Cosmic Rays, Sunspots, and Beryllium

In investigations of the past history of cosmic rays, the deposition rates (flux rates) of the beryllium isotope 10Be are often used as a proxy for the amount of cosmic rays. This is because 10Be is produced, inter alia, by cosmic rays in the atmosphere. Being a congenitally inquisitive type of fellow, I thought I’d look to see just how good a proxy 10Be might be for solar activity. Now most folks would likely do a search of the literature first, to find out what is currently known about the subject.

I don’t like doing that. Oh, the literature search is important, don’t get me wrong … but I postpone it as long as I possibly can. You see, I don’t want to be mesmerized by what is claimed to be already known. I want to look whatever it is with a fresh eye, what the Buddhists call “Beginner’s Mind”, unencumbered by decades of claims and counter-claims. In short, what I do when faced with a new field is to go find some data and analyze it. After I’ve found out what I can from the dataset, and only then, do I search the literature to find out what other folks might believe. Yes, it costs me sometimes … but usually it allows me to find things that other folks have overlooked.

In this case, I found a gem of a dataset. Here is the author’s summary:

Abstract: Annually-resolved 10Be concentrations, stable water isotope ratios and accumulation rate data from the DSS site on Law Dome, East Antarctica (spanning 1936-2009) and the Das2 site, south-east Greenland (1936-2002).

The only thing better than data is recent data, because it is more likely to be accurate, and here we have seven decades of recent 10Be deposition rates (fluxes). So, without fanfare, here’s the data in question

Figure 1. 10Be flux rates from Law Dome in Antarctica and from Southeast Greenland. Bottom panel shows the annual average sunspot count.

So … what’s not to like about these records? Well … lots of things.

The first unlikable item is that the correlation between these two 10Be datasets is pathetic, only 0.07. Seems to me like this would be enough in itself to put the whole 10Be—cosmic rays connection into doubt. I mean, if the two best recent dataset don’t agree with each other, then what are we supposed to believe?

The next problem is even larger. It is the lack of any clear 11-year signal from the variations in cosmic rays. It is well-known that cosmic rays are deflected from the solar system by the magnetic field of the sun, which varies in general sync with the sunspots. As a result, the numbers of cosmic rays, and presumably the 10Be flux rates, vary in an 11-year cycle inversely to the sunspot cycle. Here’s what the relationship looks like:

So the relation between cosmic rays and sunspots is quite solid, as you can see above. However, the problem with the 10Be records in this regard is … they have no power in the 11-year cycle range. Sunspot data has power in that range, as does the neutron count data representing cosmic rays … but the 10Be data shows nothing in that range. Here’s the periodicity analysis (see here et seq. for details of periodicity analyses):

Figure 3. Periodicity analysis of the two datasets shown in Figure 1, 10Be flux from Greenland and Antarctica

As you can see, we have no power in either the 11-year or 22-year bands … and if you look at Figure 1, you can see that their correlation with the sunspots is … well … pathetic. The correlation between Greenland 10Be and sunspots is -0.10, and between Antarctica 10Be and sunspots is even worse, -0.03 … like I said, pathetic. A cross-correlation analysis shows slightly greater correlations with a 2 year lag, but not much. However, the lack of the 11-year peaks periodicity analysis (or visible 11-year peaks in the 10Be data) suggests that the lag is spurious.

The problem is, both the sunspots and the cosmic ray counts have a huge peak in periodicity at 10-11 years … but the 10Be records show nothing of the sort.

So, at this point I’m in as much mystery as when I started. We have two beryllium-10 records. They don’t agree with each other. And according to both periodicity and correlation analysis, they don’t show any sign of being connected to anything related to the sunspots, whether by way of cosmic rays, TSI, or anything else …

Now that I’ve finished the analysis, I find that the notes to the dataset say:

Cosmogenic 10Be in polar ice cores is a primary proxy for past solar activity. However, interpretation of the 10Be record is hindered by limited understanding of the physical processes governing its atmospheric transport and deposition to the ice sheets. This issue is addressed by evaluating two accurately dated, annually resolved ice core 10Be records against modern solar activity observations and instrumental and reanalysis climate data. The cores are sampled from the DSS site on Law Dome, East Antarctica (spanning 1936–2009) and the Das2 site, south-east Greenland (1936–2002), permitting inter-hemispheric comparisons.

Concentrations at both DSS and Das2 are significantly correlated to the 11-yr solar cycle modulation of cosmic ray intensity, r = 0.54 with 95% CI [0.31; 0.70], and r = 0.45 with 95% CI [0.22; 0.62], respectively. For both sites, if fluxes are used instead of concentrations then correlations with solar activity decrease.

If you use flux rates the “Correlations with solar activity decrease”??? Yeah, they do … they decrease to insignificance. And this is a big problem. It’s a good thing I didn’t read the notes first …

Now, my understanding is that using 10Be concentrations in ice cores doesn’t give valid results. This is because the 10Be is coming down from the sky … but so is the snow. As a result, the concentration is a factor of both the 10Be flux and the snow accumulation rate. So if we want to understand the production and subsequent deposition rate of 10Be, it is necessary to correct the 10Be concentrations by using the corresponding snow accumulation rate to give us the actual flux rate. So 10Be flux rates should show a better correlation with sunspots than concentrations, because they’re free of the confounding variable of snow accumulation rate.

As a result, I’ve used the flux rates and not the concentrations … and found nothing of interest. No correlation between the datasets, no 11-year periodicity, no relationship to the solar cycle.

What am I missing here? What am I doing wrong? How can they use the concentration of 10Be rather than the flux? Are we getting accurate results from the ice cores? If not, why not?

These questions and more … please note that I make no overarching claims about the utility of 10Be as a proxy for sunspots or cosmic rays. I’m just saying that this particular 10Be data would make a p-poor proxy for anything … and once again I’m raising what to me is an important question:

If the 10Be deposition rate is claimed to be a proxy for the long-term small changes in overall levels of cosmic rays … why is there no sign in these datasets of it responding to the much larger 11-year change in cosmic rays?

I have the same question about cosmic rays and temperature. There is no sign of an 11-year cycle in the temperature, meaning any influence of cosmic rays is tiny enough to be lost in the noise. So since temperature doesn’t respond to large 11-year fluctuations in cosmic rays, why would we expect temperature to track much smaller long-term changes in the cosmic ray levels?

Always more questions than answers, may it ever be so.

My regards to everyone, guest authors, commenters, and lurkers … and of course, Anthony and the tireless mods, without whom this whole circus wouldn’t work at all.

w.

COMMENTS: Please quote the exact words that you are referring to in your comment. I’m tired of trying to guess what folks are talking about. Quote’m or you won’t get traction from me. Even if the reference is blatantly obvious to you, it may not be to others. So please, quote the exact words.

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242 thoughts on “Cosmic Rays, Sunspots, and Beryllium”

These two references cast more light [i.e. confirms] on the problem:http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1004/1004.2675.pdf
“This is a particular problem for historical projections of solar activity based on ice core measurements which assume a 1:1 correspondence. We have made other tests of the correspondence between the 10Be predictions and the ice core measurements which lead to the same conclusion, namely that other influences on the ice core measurements, as large as or larger than the production changes themselves, are occurring. These influences could be climatic or instrumentally based”
In particular: “Indeed this implies that more than 50% the 10Be flux increase around, e.g., 1700 A.D., 1810 A.D. and 1895 A.D. is due to non-production related increases!”
I.e., the Maunder minimum. Dalton Minimum, and ‘Gleissberg’ minimum in 10Be are inflated by ‘non-production’ increases.

andhttp://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1003/1003.4989.pdf
“These and other features suggest that galactic cosmic ray intensity changes which affect the production of 10Be in the Earths atmosphere are not the sole source of the 10Be concentration changes and confirm the importance of other effects, for example local and regional climatic effects, which could be of the same magnitude as the 10Be production changes.”

Of course cosmic-ray exposure is more prevalent in elevated regions of North America such as here in the Rocky Mountain area. And as always cosmic -rays depend of given energy of particles. We do know that low level cosmic-rays bombard every square inch of earth at any given moment. Moveover, cosmic-ray studies are known and suspected to have greatly influenced all life on earth though various means such as ionizing the atmosphere, that can trigger lightening and influence cloud formations, and may well have influenced genetic mutation and evolution itself.

Willis,
It is obvious what you are missing, GRANT MONEY!!!! You could have strung this out for at lest a few years and made a million or more, plus publishing rights. You also need to run it through the DIY a few times to get it thoroughly “scientificey”, so most eyes will glaze over and bow to the master. sarc/off

Your “beginners eyes” are greatly appreciated… that is a term I will remember in the future when auditing commercial buildings. I always tell operators they have blinders on when it comes to some problems. They just can’t see it, and will argue until the cows come home.

These two references cast more light [i.e. confirms] on the problem: …

Thanks, Leif. As usual, you have extensive knowledge in this field, and are good enough to share it with the rest of us. I’m glad I’m not the first person to notice this problem, and it seems to be a serious one.

w.

(For those who don’t know Leif Svalgaard, he’s a solar physicist who has a physical effect that occurs on the sun named after him [the Svalgaard-Mansurov Effect] … his science-fu is strong.)

Some very good points made By Dr. Eschenbach. I am perplexed as well, as much of the claims of those (of us) claiming natural variability of the Sun as to at least some, perhaps plenty of the global climate changes, we have relied on Beryllium 10 analysis. I wonder if other factors are masking the Solar cycles, such as geomagnetic variations and possibility cosmic dust ? Secondly, I do believe that Beryllium 10 does have, as mentioned some influence from precipitation rate. Perhaps because Antarctica is such a low snow fall area as compared to Greenland, this may have something to do with the two records not being aligned. This does not help the overall concern about the Sunspot cycles, however. This is definitely worth exploring much further. Great Post!

Willis Eschenbach says:
April 13, 2014 at 4:32 pma physical effect that occurs on the sun named after him [the Svalgaard-Mansurov Effect]
Actually, it occurs on the Earth, but is caused by the solar wind which comes from the Sun. The effect is described briefly here http://www.leif.org/research/On-Becoming-a-Scientist.pdf [slide 7].
Presentation for school children in Japan. Wonder why they are ahead of children here?

If the 10Be concentration, but not the flux, is correlated with sunspot activity (r = 0.54 and r = 0.45 for concentration vs r = -0.10 and r = -0.03 for flux) and if “the 10Be concentration is a factor of both the 10Be flux and the snow accumulation rate”, doesn’t that suggest a possible correlation with the snow accumulation rate?

Would also appreciate reading the reasons why you think Svensmark’s hypothesis applies on a centennial scale but not decadal. I have not found this assertion in my reading of his work. What have I missed?

I would think the difference between flux and concentration depends on how the Be10 is deposited. If it is captured in ice crystals and deposited in snow fall, then using concentration makes sense. I guess my question is where does the Beryllium come from?

milodonharlani says:
April 13, 2014 at 5:34 pmYou may be & probably are right, but your colleagues mentioned above apparently still find the data useful.
Unless you specify which colleagues and where mentioned I can’t comment.

scarletmacaw says:
April 13, 2014 at 5:38 pmI would think the difference between flux and concentration depends on how the Be10 is deposited. If it is captured in ice crystals and deposited in snow fall, then using concentration makes sense. I guess my question is where does the Beryllium come from?
Almost all of it comes from middle latitudes and is brought up to the poles by atmospheric circulation, hence depends on the climate itself [sort of circular logic involved].

This little study from Athens, incorporates the Cosmic Ray Induced Ionization CRII models (1+2) into their local model, giving a global view of GCR induced ionization in Earth’s atmosphere. Making it apart of the Earth’s global electric circuit too.. If the arrival is vertical and downward, does that make it a short circuit..

Cosmic Ray Induced Ionization CRII

Calculation of the cosmic ray induced ionization for the region
of Athens
P Makrantoni1, H Mavromichalaki1, I Usoskin2, A Papaioannou1

Abstract
A complete study of ionization induced by cosmic rays, both solar and galactic, in
the atmosphere, is presented. For the computation of the cosmic ray induced ionization, the
CRII model was used [1] as well its new version [2] which is extended to the upper
atmosphere. In this work, this model has been applied to the entire atmosphere, i.e. from
atmospheric depth 0 g/cm2, which corresponds to the upper limit of the atmosphere, to 1025
g/cm2, which corresponds to the surface…

…2. The CRII model
The CRII model is a full numerical model, which computes the cosmic ray induced ionization in the
entire atmosphere, all over the Globe. The model computations reproduce actual measurements of the
atmospheric ionization in the full range of parameters, from Equatorial to Polar Regions and from the
solar minimum to solar maximum.
Roughly, the CRII rate expressed as the number of ion pairs produced in one gram of the ambient
air per second (ion pairs/gr. sec) at a given atmospheric depth x can be represented in as follows:..

…3. Results
Using the CRII model [1], [2] a study of the distribution of ionization during the solar cycle 23 on a
monthly and yearly basis was performed. A gradual increase of the ionization rate from the solar
maximum to the solar minimum was observed.
The results at the solar maximum (year 2000) and minimum (year 2010), for a Polar region (Rc=0.1
GV), an Equatorial region (Rc=14.9 GV) and a middle latitude region (Athens, Rc=8.53 GV), as a
function of the atmospheric depth, are presented in Figure 1.
It is obvious that during the solar
maximum (2000), the ionization has minimum values, while during the solar minimum (2010), the
ionization is maximum. This indicates that the ionization follows the behavior of the cosmic rays,
which is negatively correlated with the solar activity. It is important to mention that during the solar
maximum, the ionization is almost two times greater at the Poles than in Athens, while during the
solar minimum, it is almost three and a half times greater. In all cases, the ionization rate is maximum
at the atmospheric depth x=100 g/cm2, with a shift to lower atmospheric depths in the Polar regions…http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/409/1/012232/pdf/1742-6596_409_1_012232.pdf

If the 10Be concentration, but not the flux, is correlated with sunspot activity (r = 0.54 and r = 0.45 for concentration vs r = -0.10 and r = -0.03 for flux) and if “the 10Be concentration is a factor of both the 10Be flux and the snow accumulation rate”, doesn’t that suggest a possible correlation with the snow accumulation rate?

Could be … I’ve posted up the data as an Excel spreadsheet. It contains the accumulation rates. See what you can find …

I was wondering about 10Be being a proxy for solar activity and began to search for 10Be date for Solar Cycle 24. Could never find a chart or graph. But in the meantime found a few articles and was intrigued by this one in Astronomy & Astrophysics titled:

Flux is the appropriate measure only if we assume that beryllium is deposited evenly and steadily across the entire surface of the planet. But it seems much more likely to me that beryllium is transported out of the atmosphere by precipitation and hence is deposited quite unevenly and unsteadily across the planet. Areas with high precipitation would then be expected to receive a high beryllium flux while those with low precipitation will get only a small amount. In this scenario concentration is much better measure than flux of the rate of beryllium production as in a well mixed atmosphere the rate of beryllium production should determine the concentration of beryllium in precipitation.

Look to see which of flux or concentration is least strongly correlated with local rates of precipitation. That would be the best measure to use.

Willis, the points you make do not really undo the tapestry woven around 10Be. What you have shown however is that the way ice cores are formed is uneven and presents perhaps a very unreliable proxy for anything, especially the magnetic environment of the planets.

It was not mentioned very clearly that 10Be is a proxy for the influence of the magnetic field of the sun, which might not align perfectly with sunspot number. The sunspot number is a proxy for the magnetic field strength, not so? So your good math is comparing two proxies for the strength of the magnetic field and finds a poor correlation. Maybe it cannot be disentangled.

There is a lot on the Internet about longer timelines. 10Be apparently records the passage of the solar system through the arms of the galaxy for example. But that doesn’t come from ice cores. Maybe an ice core is a lousy tape recorder for the songs of the Sun.

Some here may know the UK Met Office official who looked & sounded straight out of Monty Python twit central casting.

But IMO the effect of UV variation is also worthy of consideration, primarily because of its affect on ozone formation in the stratosphere, rather than (as I once hypothesized but was dissuaded from pursuing by Leif) directly upon the oceans.

lsvalgaard says:
April 13, 2014 at 4:35 pm
In trying to extract the 11-yr modulation from the noisy 10Be-record people often filter the data to contain only periods between ~8 and ~14 years…
———————
I do not pretend to be a solar expert. But here is what I know about filtering noisy signals (from professional experience). If you are not careful, you will create the signal you are looking for by removing all other noise. The fact is that white noise contains all possible sine waves. By filtering out all the others, you will always be left the the one you are looking for. Whatever solution you come up with for your filter, you must (MUST) run true white noise through it first to insure that you are not creating the desired signal. If you don’t, you will see the signal, and your confirmation bias will trick you into thinking that you are a genius, when in fact you are a fool.

Along the same lines as scarletmacaw’s comment, it is feasible that what correlates with sunspots and cosmic ray activity is the concentration of 10Be in water vapor in the atmosphere. Leif S. says that most 10Be production is in the middle latitudes, so there is also likely a (short?) lag between cosmic ray activity and 10Be concentration in the snowfall at the poles.

milodonharlani says:
April 13, 2014 at 6:36 pmThose I mentioned just above your comment, ie Shaviv & Nef on 14C, to whom could be added others, of course, such as your compatriots Friis-Christensen & Svensmark.
Ah, the hypothesis pushers themselves. Yes, one would expect that, but that doesn’t really count. What counts is when others validate their hypothesis, and that has not happened. On the contrary: http://www.leif.org/EOS/eost14928-Cosmic-Rays-Hypothesis.pdf
“In our analysis [Rahmstorf et al, 2004], we arrived at two main conclusions: the data of Shaviv and Veizer [2003] do not show a significant correlation of cosmic ray flux (CRF) and climate, and the authors’ estimate of climate sensitivity to CO2 based on a simple regression analysis is questionable. After careful consideration of Shaviv and Veizer’s comment, we want to uphold and reaffirm these conclusions”

And, let us not slide into the same, old, tired stuff. We have been there before.

Jeff in Calgary says:
April 13, 2014 at 6:41 pm“In trying to extract the 11-yr modulation from the noisy 10Be-record people often filter the data to contain only periods between ~8 and ~14 years…”first to insure that you are not creating the desired signal. If you don’t, you will see the signal, and your confirmation bias will trick you into thinking that you are a genius, when in fact you are a fool.
Which was my point. On the other hand, if there is a signal, the filtering sharpens it. That you see the ‘signal’ in the filtered data does not guarantee that there is a real signal, as you point out.

scarletmacaw says:
April 13, 2014 at 5:38 pm
…. I guess my question is where does the Beryllium come from?
—————————
Almost all of it comes from middle latitudes and is brought up to the poles by atmospheric circulation, hence depends on the climate itself [sort of circular logic involved].
_______________________________
So, the theory is 10Be is a good proxy for cosmic rays, but 10Be in polar ice cores may not be? the polar ice cores is noise due to wind and weather patterns, coupled with delays from the 10Be creation, to the time it was actually deposited onto the polar ice? The question is, can the noise be reliably removed from the signal. Based on Willis’ Figure 3, I would be very sceptical is someone claimed that they could. Even with the 8 – 14 year filter previously mentioned, the 11(ish) year cycle is a low point on the Periodicity analysis.
PS how is the Periodicity analysis calculated? Is it a FFT?

Be-10 is one of multiple isotopes produced by cosmic rays, with others including Carbon-14 and Ti-44.

Referring to the bulk of the overall pattern over time, not implying identicality (unrealistic and unnecessary), a Kirkby paper notes:

“The good agreement found between the 10Be and 14C records confirms that their variations [primarily] reflect real changes of the cosmic ray flux and [primarily] not climatic influences on the transport processes into their respective archives [56].”

The situation is best seen with a broad combo of Be-10 / C-14 cosmogenic isotope, sunspot count, solar cycle length, and neutron monitor illustrations in http://tinyurl.com/nbnh7hq

(That link also includes an example of how not to interpret r or r^2 correlation values, with an illustration for sunspots versus CRF).

Not every dataset is going to be the same, partially due to real world complications like some short-term weather influence, potentially alternatively at times due to how datasets of major climate significance tend to be rewritten sooner or later towards more CAGW movement convenience. There are examples in the prior link with drastic rewriting of temperature history over the past century from relatively double-peak (related to the pattern in solar activity meanwhile) towards a hockey stick (able to claim more mismatch then).

An additional illustration would be Ti-44 from space meteorites; for example:

“An international team of researchers led by Ilya Usoskin of the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory at the University of Oulu, Finland, may have the answer. They examined meteorites that had fallen to Earth over the past 240 years. By analyzing the amount of titanium 44, a radioactive isotope, the team found a significant increase in the Sun’s radioactive output during the 20th century.

Over the past few decades, however, they found the solar activity has stabilized at this higher-than-historic level.

Prior research relied on measurements of certain radioactive elements within tree rings and in the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, which can be altered by terrestrial processes, not just by solar activity. The isotope measured in the new study is not affected by conditions on Earth.

The results, detailed in this week’s issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters, “confirm that there was indeed an increase in solar activity over the last 100 years or so,” Usoskin told SPACE.com.”

We would all do well if scientific papers were written in a similar clear prose, instead of being immersed and obfuscated in the accepted contemporary ‘scientific’ phrasing and jargon.

Thanks, Mark. My readership is the scientifically minded layman as well as the professional scientist, and I aim to write accordingly. And yes, the scientific writing style does not foster communication …

My question had to do with the 14C data from Shaviv & Nef. You have stated the issues you have with 14C, but when those data, the 10Be data, the observed temperature, proxy data from the Maunder & Dalton Minima, the experimental results from Svensmark’s own team & CERN & some correlation with observations of cloud & T, among other evidence, all suggest the same effect, how can you reject the GCR hypothesis with such certainty, indeed vehemence?

I’m not convinced, but there does seem to be enough evidence to continue entertaining the hypothesis. IMO it has not been shown false.

Henry Clark says:
April 13, 2014 at 6:50 pmBe-10 is one of multiple isotopes produced by cosmic rays, with others including Carbon-14 and Ti-44.
For say 25-40 year averages the sources tend to agree reasonably well [depending a bit on which dataset one uses], but that does’nt really matter as the combined record still is very poorly correlated with climate, e.g. slide 13 of http://www.leif.org/research/Eddy-Symp-Poster-2.pdf

“””””…..I have the same question about cosmic rays and temperature. There is no sign of an 11-year cycle in the temperature, meaning any influence of cosmic rays is tiny enough to be lost in the noise. So since temperature doesn’t respond to large 11-year fluctuations in cosmic rays, why would we expect temperature to track much smaller long-term changes in the cosmic ray levels?…..”””””

Say Willis, did you slip a cog here or what ?

” So since temperature doesn’t respond to large 11-year fluctuations in cosmic rays”

Did you mean 11 year fluctuations in TSI; you seem to say cosmic rays twice.

You got that wrong. I do not reject or dismiss anything, I show you why their case is not convincing to me. Perhaps my standard is too high and your too low. That is possible, but do not mistake persistence for vehemence,

Henry Clark says:
April 13, 2014 at 6:50 pm
…
——————-
Yes, but how do you reconcile the lack of correlation to know reality? 10Be and C14 etc. is interesting, but if they do not match reality, they are proxies for something other than cosmic rays. In fact, this statement:
“The good agreement found between the 10Be and 14C records confirms that their variations [primarily] reflect real changes of the cosmic ray flux and [primarily] not climatic influences on the transport processes into their respective archives [56].”
suggest that they must indeed be a proxy for something, but the question is…What? Willis’ Figure 3 clearly demonstrates that it is highly unlikely to be for cosmic rays. I was thinking that the transport issue could severely “smudge” the archival delay, to the extent that even the 11 year cycle could be invisible, but it could still be OK for longer term measurements, like long solar minimums. However, the close correlation with 14C, kind of debunks that, making 10Be hopeless as a proxy for cosmic rays IMHO.

The lack of correlation you noticed in those plots raises several interesting questions.

Is 10Be production modulated by the energy of the cosmic rays as well as the flux?
Many nuclear reactions have a preferred energy for them to occur for example fission of nuclear weapons materials or nuclear reactor core materials are more efficient with slow neutrons than fast neutrons, which is why reactor designs include moderators to shift the neutron energies into the favorable range.

Is precipitation in the arctic and antarctic periodically driven by different atmospheric sources of water vapor with substantially different 10Be content. For example if the local weather patterns shift so that most of the moisture forming the snow pack comes from surface evaporation off the nearby oceans rather than from ice crystals formed at high altitudes from vapor with long residence times in the areas where 10Be production occurs you should get different fluxes of 10Be, independent of actual total snow fall, but varying according to the source of the moisture captured by the snow that forms over the ice caps.

Do ice core profiles of 10Be from nearby bore holes in the same ice pack agree substantially with each other even though they differ from ice cores from the opposite pole? This would imply differences in 10Be production in the southern hemisphere and northern hemisphere, perhaps due to polarity issues with the magnetic poles and the contemporary polarity of the suns magnetic field at the time the 10Be was produced.

Does 10Be leech move or migrate in the ice column according to temperatures of the ice or presence of some other trace chemical that might allow it to migrate up or down the ice column.

Lots of possible mechanisms to consider but not having looked in depth at the issue only a few off the top of my head issues to investigate.

Read through it all, there is a discussion plus further underlying references, including the IEEE paper laying out the theoretical basis.

Basically, it works by averaging out the cycle. You know how you make monthly averages? You divide a long string of monthly data into chunks of 12, stack them up, and average the columns. This gives you a curve representing the average monthly values for January, February and so on.

Now, imagine that you do the same thing with annual data, cut it into 12-year chunks, stack them up and average them. If you do that, you get whatever actual average 12-year cycle exists in the data. And by extension you can calculate the 11-year cycle, or any other length.

Of course, if there is no 11-year cycle in the data, basically your result will be a straight line … but if there is such a cycle, it will appear as some kind of curve. As a measure of the strength of the cycle, we use the standard deviation (SD) of the results—a straight line (no cycle) has an SD of zero, and the bigger the swings the bigger the SD. (This is adjusted, of course, by the length of the cycle, as a long cycle inherently has a larger SD.)

ADVANTAGES:

1. Resolution equal to the original data across the entire range.
2. Finds non-sine-wave cycles.
3. Allows you to examine the actual cycles.

DISADVANTAGES

1. Any given cycle (say 144 months) will appear at multiples of that cycle (288 months, etc.).
2. Decomposition is not orthogonal, so if you wish to decompose a signal into component cycles, the result depends on the order of the removal of said component cycles.

I mentioned Rahmstorf’s heavy investment in CACA because you seemed dismissive of the evidence presented by the mentioned proponents of the GCR hypothesis just because they were its early supporters. In the case of its extension to cosmoclimatology, I suppose Shaviv could be considered an originator.

You have other colleagues who aren’t convinced by Rahmstorf, so IMO the GCR hypothesis remains neither sufficiently confirmed nor falsified. IMO however Kirkby’s results are pretty convincing with respect to the mechanism by which GCRs could affect climate on earth & for that matter some other solar system bodies.

Copernicus started work on his heliocentric hypothesis around 1507, published privately shortly thereafter & publicly in 1543, but Ptolemy wasn’t falsified until 1610 & the mobile-earth, sun-centered system definitely shown objectively true until the 18th & 19th centuries. I hope science doesn’t have to wait that long for the GCR-climate hypothesis to be shown valid or false.

lsvalgaard says:
April 13, 2014 at 5:44 pm
…
scarletmacaw says:
April 13, 2014 at 5:38 pm
I would think the difference between flux and concentration depends on how the Be10 is deposited. If it is captured in ice crystals and deposited in snow fall, then using concentration makes sense. I guess my question is where does the Beryllium come from?
Almost all of it comes from middle latitudes and is brought up to the poles by atmospheric circulation, hence depends on the climate itself [sort of circular logic involved].

The apparent answer would therefore be to develop a 10Be dataset from a mid-latitude ice-core to see if there’s a stronger 11-year signal. I went looking and couldn’t find such an existing dataset. Is there a technical reason why this couldn’t be done?

“””””…..I have the same question about cosmic rays and temperature. There is no sign of an 11-year cycle in the temperature, meaning any influence of cosmic rays is tiny enough to be lost in the noise. So since temperature doesn’t respond to large 11-year fluctuations in cosmic rays, why would we expect temperature to track much smaller long-term changes in the cosmic ray levels?…..”””””

Say Willis, did you slip a cog here or what ?

” So since temperature doesn’t respond to large 11-year fluctuations in cosmic rays”

Did you mean 11 year fluctuations in TSI; you seem to say cosmic rays twice.

G

Thanks, George. Since the fluctuations in TSI, sunspots, solar magnetic field, and cosmic rays all move in approximate synchrony with an ~ 11-year cycle, then ceteris paribus what’s true of one is true of all.

My question in general is, what would make something respond to a slow small secular variations in some purported forcing, while at the same time it doesn’t respond to a much stronger faster 11-year cycle of the same forcing?

Willis I appreciate your hard work producing these graphs. They must give you some exciting work and I commend you for that, but remember that most of us here haven’t a deep scientific understanding to comment on your graphs To stipulate whom should respond to them is a bit elitist and selective in my opinion. I say no more.We know cosmic rays are deflected from earth due to solar activities, hence less contact with water vapour in our atmosphere.

milodonharlani says:
April 13, 2014 at 7:32 pmThere are some good candidate extrapolar glaciers, like Alaska’s deep Taku, although it’s at about 58 N.
The problem [which people have considered] is that the ice need to be stable, both for science reasons and even more so from a boring perspective.

milodonharlani says:
April 13, 2014 at 7:24 pmI hope science doesn’t have to wait that long for the GCR-climate hypothesis to be shown valid or false
It is OK to speculate [even wildly] as long as it is labeled ‘speculation’. The problem is that followers peddle the hypothesis as gospel truth.

Note, there are multiple mechanisms by which the solar magnetic cycle changes modulate planetary cloud cover. Solar wind bursts create a space charge differential in the ionosphere which removes cloud forming ions by the process that is called electroscavenging.
If there are low latitude coronal holes late in the solar cycle, the coronal holes create solar wind bursts that remove cloud forming ions thereby making it appear that high GCR does not affect planetary cloud cover.

The geomagnetic activity reflects the impact of solar activity originating from both closed and open magnetic field regions, so it is a better indicator of solar activity than the sunspot number which is related to only closed magnetic field regions. It has been noted that in the last century the correlation between sunspot number and geomagnetic activity has been steadily decreasing from – 0.76 in the period 1868- 1890, to 0.35 in the period 1960-1982, while the lag has increased from 0 to 3 years (Vieira et al. 2001). According to Echer et al. (2004), the probable cause seems to be related to the double peak structure of geomagnetic activity.

The second peak, related to high speed solar wind from coronal holes, seems to have increased relative to the first one, related to sunspots (CMEs) but, as already mentioned, this type of solar activity is not accounted for by the sunspot number. In Figure 6 the long-term variations in global temperature are compared to the long-term variations in geomagnetic activity as expressed by the ak-index (Nevanlinna and Kataja 2003). The correlation between the two quantities is 0.85 with p<0.01 for the whole period studied. It could therefore be concluded that both the decreasing correlation between sunspot number and geomagnetic activity, and the deviation of the global temperature long-term trend from solar activity
as expressed by sunspot index are due to the increased number of high-speed streams of solar wind on the declining phase and in the minimum of sunspot cycle in the last decades.

“So since temperature doesn’t respond to large 11-year fluctuations in cosmic rays, why would we expect temperature to track much smaller long-term changes in the cosmic ray levels?”

I have a lot to ask you about that, but first let me clear up “smaller long-term changes in the cosmic ray levels”. Can you present a graph of “cosmic ray levels” on geologic time, along with your confidence in it?

“Almost all of it comes from middle latitudes and is brought up to the poles by atmospheric circulation, hence depends on the climate itself [sort of circular logic involved]”.

That brings us back to my proposition that solar variations affect jet stream tracks and that the changes over a single solar cycle are swamped by ocean cycles and short term chaotic variability.

Top down solar effects on global air circulation are heavily modulated by bottom up oceanic effects with the global climate zone distribution being dependent on the net interaction between the two at any given time.

Willis Eschenbach says:
April 13, 2014 at 7:20 pmYou’ve linked to the Holgate sunspot nonsense, which I falsified in my post “Sunspots and Sea Level“.

That post is an example of misleading misinterpretation of correlation calculations. The correlation example section of my http://tinyurl.com/nbnh7hq link highlights how and why one wouldn’t expect a chain of a sunspot proxy -> actual solar magnetic activity -> influence on cosmic ray flux -> influence on cloud cover -> influence on terrestrial temperature -> influence on estimated sea level history to be a correlation chain with a r^2 of 1, despite the major relationship as seen in the link.

For example, with plots seen there:

“Real world data is messy even for a well-known major relationship between sunspots and cosmic ray flux (CRF) reaching Earth.

For the 5 year plot above, linear correlation is low, with r^2 being closer to 0 than 1, specifically 0.113 (despite CRF data being pressure corrected
by the source for air mass shielding overhead fluctuating). Does such prove that CRF has no relationship with sunspots? No.”

However, while I go on to discuss that further, also adding other illustrations (including over the whole 50 year period of a neutron monitor’s data), it would be redundant to further requote here what is within the link already.

Meanwhile, a Shaviv 2008 paper, as quoted and linked in the preceding, discusses such at a higher and less biased level, in fact finding “the high Neff = 67 gives rise to a 99.99% confidence that random realizations with similar autocorrelation functions as the actual signals can not give such a high coefficient r” for sea level history versus a reconstruction of solar activity. Shaviv 2008: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.173.2162&rep=rep1&type=pdf

If you want to disagree with Dr. Shaviv while claiming the correlation would be likely to arise by chance without a relationship, try to prove it properly: Write a program creating random output and see how many iterations it takes to make anything with as much similarity.

Jeff in Calgary says:
April 13, 2014 at 7:05 pm
“I was thinking that the transport issue could severely “smudge” the archival delay, to the extent that even the 11 year cycle could be invisible, but it could still be OK for longer term measurements, like long solar minimums. However, the close correlation with 14C, kind of debunks that, making 10Be hopeless as a proxy for cosmic rays”

Your latter sentence is just backwards logic. No correlation with C-14 is what would debunk that, not high correlation with Carbon 14.

The relationship over the centuries between Be-10 and C-14 (and Ti-44 from space meteorites originally beyond earth weather) is exactly what supports Kirkby’s statement of:

“The good agreement found between the 10Be and 14C records confirms that their variations [primarily] reflect real changes of the cosmic ray flux and [primarily] not climatic influences on the transport processes into their respective archives [56].”

A problem with pretending variation in them is just from terrestrial weather processes is that they aren’t all subject to the same ones, like the chemistry affecting a beryllium atom is much different from one affecting a carbon atom (let alone a titanium atom in deep space). What Be-10, C-14, and Ti-44 isotopes share is nuclear formation under cosmic ray bombardment.

[That statement suggests] “that they must indeed be a proxy for something, but the question is…What? Willis’ Figure 3 clearly demonstrates that it is highly unlikely to be for cosmic rays.

A proxy does not have to be 100% perfect. Sunspots aren’t either, though just throwing hands up in the air and saying one knew nothing about past solar activity wouldn’t be remotely true.

You could take just about any pair of proxy data sets used in climatology for almost anything and not get an exact match, in that kind of periodicity analysis. For instance, you could, by similar logic, “prove” lack of correlation between average NH temperature over the past several centuries (from one reconstruction) versus the same (from another reconstruction). Two different reconstructions of even the same quantity commonly differ, like not all reconstructions of historical NH average temperature are the same, as among the examples in http://tinyurl.com/nbnh7hq .

Greenland and Antarctica are not even at the same location in Earth’s geomagnetic field, which is among other influences on cosmic ray flux.

Anyway, regarding Eschenbach’s figure 3, whenever extra processing is applied to raw data, there are two options to interpret it with any decent accuracy:

Option 1, the hard way:
Begin with the missing first step: Before using any methodology, check the methodology itself and the interpretation of it. Does such have no implausible results if applied elsewhere? Or is that kind of periodicity analysis, if expecting an exact match, a lot like a computer program which could take in practically any pair of proxies for anything in real-world climate data and spit out a “mismatch” result? In a separate but semi-analogous example, there is an illustration in my prior link of what nonsense conclusions can be generated by misapplying processing to superficially check for correlation. Another step would be to check all of the code going into generating that figure.

Option 2, the easy way:
Look at the raw original data directly without all the extra steps of processing, so less has to be verified. For example, the plots in my link are in most cases raw data with fancy processing neither needed nor desirable.

Jeff in Calgary says:
April 13, 2014 at 6:41 pm
here is what I know about filtering noisy signals (from professional experience).
================
very much like tree ring “calibration”. filter the data based on the result you are looking for, and you will create a phony signal (spurious correlation) where no correlation exists.

Filtering is a bad idea if you intend to apply statistics after the filter, because the unfiltered data is telling you that statistically the raw data is NFG. After you apply the filter your data is no better, but now your statistics will rate the correlation much higher.

So, it is not only medicine, tree rings, and social sciences that suffer from faulty statistical methods. Now solar sciences are getting into the act.

Svensmark and Shaviv both emphasise the secondary cosmic ray known as the muon.
There is a muon observatory at Antarctica, The Mawson Cosmic Ray Observatory. It may be possible to gain access to their counting database. It could be interesting.

Svensmark also makes the observation that there is a time delay for CRs entering the heliosphere and reaching Earth orbit of about 18 months. The implication being a noticable time lag in effects.

You’ve linked to the Holgate sunspot nonsense, which I falsified in my post “Sunspots and Sea Level“.

That post is an example of misleading misinterpretation of correlation calculations.

That statement is an example of an opinion unsupported by facts, logic, math, or evidence of any kind. Massive fail. If you want to find fault with the logic, math, or data in my post, you’ll have to bring more than your mouth.

… For example, with plots seen there:

“Real world data is messy even for a well-known major relationship between sunspots and cosmic ray flux (CRF) reaching Earth.

Say what? Go back to the top of the page. Look at Figure 2. That is hardly “messy”, it is a very clear and well defined inverse relationship between sunspots and cosmic rays. In addition, it shows up very clearly in the periodicity data. The sunspots contain lots of energy in the 10-11-year range. The neutron counts, unsurprisingly, contain lots of energy in the same 10-11-year range.

On the other hand, the 10Be data contains only random energy in the 10-11 year range.

That’s not messy. That’s a clear ~ 11-year cycle in the sunspots, and a corresponding 11-year cycle in cosmic rays … accompanied by no ~11-year cycle in the 10Be data at all.

You can wave your hands and claim oh, it’s all far too messy, but that is a clear, bright-line distinction between related phenomena, and unrelated phenomena.

sophocles says:
April 13, 2014 at 10:51 pmSvensmark also makes the observation that there is a time delay for CRs entering the heliosphere and reaching Earth orbit of about 18 months. The implication being a noticable time lag in effects.
No, the effect should happen when the cosmic ray hits the Earth, no matter how long time ago it entered the heliosphere 100 AU away.

April 13, 2014 at 5:38 pm
I would think the difference between flux and concentration depends on how the Be10 is deposited. If it is captured in ice crystals and deposited in snow fall, then using concentration makes sense. I guess my question is where does the Beryllium come from?
Almost all of it comes from middle latitudes and is brought up to the poles by atmospheric circulation, hence depends on the climate itself [sort of circular logic involved].

The apparent answer would therefore be to develop a 10Be dataset from a mid-latitude ice-core to see if there’s a stronger 11-year signal. I went looking and couldn’t find such an existing dataset. Is there a technical reason why this couldn’t be done?

Not many tropical ice caps or glaciers. But the bigger problem is that the serial non-archiving couple, Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Mosley-Thompson have been paid big money to drill the tropical ice cores … but they haven’t archived the majority of the results, and then only very grudgingly. They deserve the opprobrium of the scientific community for taking taxpayer money and using it to their personal advantage. It is despicable … but of course, nobody in the activist scientific camp is willing to say the slightest bad thing about any other activist. They view that as treason and betrayal, look what’s happened to Judith Curry for doing much less.

So that’s the sad answer, Graeme. A couple of sleazy “scientific” PhD-toting con artists took the taxpayer’s money, went on their mountain adventure, and then hid away and pocketed the results.

Anyhow, in their honor, I propose that we use their name as a verb, so that if you say you’re going to thompson your results, it means you’ll get the grant and then never let the data see the light of day. That would be justice …

Willis I appreciate your hard work producing these graphs. They must give you some exciting work and I commend you for that, but remember that most of us here haven’t a deep scientific understanding to comment on your graphs To stipulate whom should respond to them is a bit elitist and selective in my opinion. I say no more.We know cosmic rays are deflected from earth due to solar activities, hence less contact with water vapour in our atmosphere.

bushbunny, I haven’t a clue what you mean by your claim that I “stipulate whom should respond”. Was there some part of the following that escaped your notice?

COMMENTS: Please quote the exact words that you are referring to in your comment. I’m tired of trying to guess what folks are talking about. Quote’m or you won’t get traction from me. Even if the reference is blatantly obvious to you, it may not be to others. So please, quote the exact words.

w.

PS—Yes, we know that cosmic rays are deflected by heliomagnetism. I stated it in the head post. Why are you repeating what I already said?

ferd berple says:
April 13, 2014 at 11:17 pmWhat do the non polar data sets show? do they show 10B3 correlation with the suns magnetic cycles?
I haven’t seen any based on ice cores, so can’t tell. The time resolution for the rock exposure data is not good enough for this.

Note, there are multiple mechanisms by which the solar magnetic cycle changes modulate planetary cloud cover. Solar wind bursts create a space charge differential in the ionosphere which removes cloud forming ions by the process that is called electroscavenging.
If there are low latitude coronal holes late in the solar cycle, the coronal holes create solar wind bursts that remove cloud forming ions thereby making it appear that high GCR does not affect planetary cloud cover.

William, that’s a lovely hypothesis … but I’m a practical guy. IF there is an effect on the cloud cover from the changes in cosmic rays / heliomagnetism / sunspots, it would perforce have to operate on an 11-year cycle. So unlike you, always propounding your theories, I go out looking for EVIDENCE. And the problem is, I can find no evidence of such 11-year effects.

Dunno if you saw it in my other post, but in the comments I mentioned that I ran a periodicity analysis on the data from the Armagh Observatory, one of the longest. In this comment, I discuss the results. What I did was to look at the monthly temperature range (MTR). The MTR is the difference between the max and min temperatures for the month. Since in general clouds warm the nights and cool the days, months with lots of clouds should show a smaller MTR than the same month with less cloud.

However, again I found no cycles in the 10-11 year range, in fact, I found no significant cycles at all except for the curious 44-month cycle that I’ve seen in a few datasets without explanation. If GCRs are regulating cloud cover, someone forgot to send Armagh the memo …

So … your hypothesis might indeed be shown to be correct someday. In the meantime, I can’t find any evidence to support it. And you restating your hypothesis over and over does nothing. If you think the GCRs affect the temperature, then find me the temperature dataset with a strong 11-year cycle in it. So far, all of the evidence supports my side of the discussion. I’ve looked at lots of temperature datasets and found nothing. But heck, I’m always happy to be surprised … but it’s gonna take observations to do it.

“So since temperature doesn’t respond to large 11-year fluctuations in cosmic rays, why would we expect temperature to track much smaller long-term changes in the cosmic ray levels?”

I have a lot to ask you about that, but first let me clear up “smaller long-term changes in the cosmic ray levels”. Can you present a graph of “cosmic ray levels” on geologic time, along with your confidence in it?

I have no confidence in the GCR levels over geologic time. Even over a millennium the proxies are in large disagreement. There’s an example of one such study here.

Note the bottom panel in the graphic, which shows Greenland and Antarctic ice core 10Be … and note how little agreement there is between them.

However, we have good data back to about 1960. This allows us to correlate the variations in GCRs with sunspot levels, and that lets us use the sunspot levels as a proxy for GCRs back a couple hundred years. I have medium confidence in that kind of reconstruction. However, I haven’t disassembled one of those reconstructions myself, so I can’t really point you to a good one.

Leif is the real authority in this area, I was born yesterday, so perhaps he’ll answer the question.

Let’s put this in a form that non-statisticians and non-physicists can relate to.

“If the 10Be concentration, but not the flux, is correlated with sunspot activity (r = 0.54 and r = 0.45 for concentration vs r = -0.10 and r = -0.03 for flux)”

The correlation coefficients (R) indicate R-squared of 0.30 and 0.20 which means the 10Be explains only 20% to 30% of the variance in cosmic ray flux.

Someone asked about the source of 10Be.

When an energetic particle (proton in the form of a cosmic ray) collides with a molecule of oxygen, or more likely in the outer atmosphere, an atom of ionized oxygen, then 10Be is produced by spallation, which is a naturally occurring form of fission, splitting of the oxygen atom. Other products can be formed by striking other kinds of matter, but 10Be is useful for dating because its half-life of over 1.3 million years as 10Be breaks down to produce boron-10.

Willis
Perhaps the primary data is the concentration and the flux is derived from that. I am having trouble imagining the apparatus that would count 150 atoms per square metre per second, especially in the ’50s. There would be all kinds of variables in such a calculation.

1. Do I understand it correct that only 55g/yr is produced of 10Be?
2. If so, wouldn’t that make 10Be a very difficult proxy, because both its presence and chance of being found somewhere are so small?
3. Wouldn’t 14C make a better proxy? (slightly better; 8 kg if true isn’t much either)
4. And is 10Be used because it’s in the ice-cores instead of in treerings? Or is 14C also present in CO2 that is captured in icecore bubbles?

And a final qustion:
5. Svensmarks theory is about clouds and cosmic rays. What would, in your opinion, be a good proxy for the nuclei that are said to be produced by cosmic rays?

A proxy does not have to be 100% perfect. Sunspots aren’t either, though just throwing hands up in the air and saying one knew nothing about past solar activity wouldn’t be remotely true.

You could take just about any pair of proxy data sets used in climatology for almost anything and not get an exact match, in that kind of periodicity analysis.

Well, let’s test that, shall we … here are the periodicity analyses of sunspots and cosmic rays, both of which are used as proxies in climatology. In particular, sunspots are used as a proxy for cosmic rays.

I do love folks like you that pontificate on subjects about which you know little, and speak confidently of things you’ve never tested … have you ever done a periodicity analysis, Henry? And if not, as I suspect is the case … why are you prating about them?

Great investigation Willis. I like the beginner’s mind approach. What you are seeing here is what is so common in climatology is that researchers find a paper , take it at face value without checking whether it makes sense. Then bias confirmation rears it’s ugly head, and if the result of the paper fits what they think , they use it cite it and publish another layer of unfounded science.

I went through this John Kennedy in our discussion about “validation” of hadSST “bias corrections” . The validation process cited a japanese paper that did some blatant selection bias and was from a very small geographical area. When I raised the point that the study was not itself valid and in terms of the global adjustments was nothing more than a geographic anecdote, John told me I should take it up with the authors , rather than saying why he though he disagreed and had accepted the results as “validation” of their work.

For some reason the logic that seems to be applied is that once something is published and no one takes the trouble to rebut it. You don’t need to think for yourself whether the paper makes sense or is well executed before using its results. If it’s part of the litchurchur you just reuse it and propagate any errors.

With the massive volume or work being published now, a lot of it frankly bunk, this leads to a very strong possibility of exponential growth of errors since the negative feedback of supposedly intelligent and competent persons checking the workings of a paper before using its results seems to have disappeared. The main criterium seems to be bias confirmation.

I appreciate the author showing “code” used in performing the analysis. I do wish that all authors would be more specific, state language, compiler version and hardware. A reproduction of the compiler report would be “comforting” and appreciated. Any “warnings” ? Particularly when library functions or procedures are called. Thanks.

I cannot help but feeling that a better correlation might be obtained from glaciers nearer the equator if that was possible.

At the near polar sites you used, the sun is not seen for 4-5 months of the year and in the rest of the year, the cosmic rays would have to pass much greater thicknesses of atmosphere and presumably the. charged particles would be more absorbed than at near equatorial sites.

Willis Eschenbach says:
April 14, 2014 at 12:24 am“Well, let’s test that, shall we … here are the periodicity analyses of sunspots and cosmic rays, both of which are used as proxies in climatology. In particular, sunspots are used as a proxy for cosmic rays.

I do love folks like you that pontificate on subjects about which you know little, and speak confidently of things you’ve never tested … have you ever done a periodicity analysis, Henry?“”

An “exact match” would have those two lines on top of each other and indistinguishable throughout the entire graph, but, for sunspots versus cosmic ray flux, the specific calculation I have done is of correlation:

Linear correlation between monthly data on sunspot counts and cosmic ray flux (neutron monitor count) is a r^2 of 0.648 over a half century period of data from 1964 to 2013, while having an r^2 of 0.113 over a period from 1980 to 1985. (Overall the larger period is more relevant, although the smaller one highlights how the time period can matter). Neither is a r^2 of 1 or near 1. The point is not that CRF is unrelated to sunspots (for they are related) but to highlight how a r^2 value near 1 should not be expected even with solar activity being a major influence on CRF.

I challenge you to either (a) demonstrate a r^2 value of correlation between sunspots and CRF of about 1, uploading all data and calculations, without resorting to something you wouldn’t otherwise like very long scale averaging, or (b) admit that two quantities can be much related without r^2 linear correlation being near 1.

(Note to readers: Look closely to see which sentences above get snipped and not quoted in the subsequent reply; some things can be excused by lack of time, but that isn’t the prime factor here).

Balloon measurements of cosmic ray flux with modern detectors can get very different results depending on location (GeV cutoff, degree of shielding overhead), and that can be seen by figure 7 in the http://arxiv.org/pdf/0804.1938v1.pdf paper. Particularly over the period prior to 1980, compare the plotted green Alma-Ata (Kazakhstan) cosmic ray intensity with others like the readings above Moscow (red).

Such isn’t a matter of comparing Greenland and Antarctica in two different Be-10 datasets but more direct measurements of cosmic ray intensity, where weather isn’t even an impacting variable any more (when pressure-corrected).

If I was into bad usage of correlation stats, I would feed that plot’s data into a digitalizer, get a r^2 closer to 0 than 1, and thus “prove” that cosmic ray flux above the mid-latitude location had nothing to do with it above the higher latitude locations. That would not be a correct conclusion.

Interesting stuff–very convincing. But looking at the issue on a longer time scale is enough to give you a headache. I’m looking at a plot of 10Be from 1400 AD to the present and I can easily pick out the Wolf, Sporer, Maunder, Dalton, and 1880-1915 Solar Minimums from just the 10Be curve. And plotting δ18O from the GISP2 Greenland ice core data and overlaying it on the 10Be curve gives a good correlation with paleotemperature. Overlaying it on the CET temperature curve also gives a reasonably good fit—not perfect, but discernable. But how can that be, given the convincing data that Willis and Leif have shown? How can both be correct? Seems like a bit of a stretch to conclude that these longer term correlations are just coincidence, or that the data isn’t very good and just happens to match up, or something unrelated to solar variation is responsible. As I said, ‘nuff to give you a headache!

Here is my reconstruction of CET from 1659 to 1538. It is evident that the period around `1500 to the start of the reconstruction will turn out to be rather warm. The 50 years from 1450 look as if they were rather cold.

If you overlay your plot against this extended record how does it look?

Come on!
10Be in polar ice cores is a totally reliable way of measuring solar activity.
After all we know just how accurate paleo-proxy methods are in calculating temperatures, rainfall etc etc.
We know the Global Temperature in the Southern hemisphere in the 1880s to .1 degree C even though there were probably not more than a score of thermometers in the southern hemisphere at the time…the lady who counted the isotopes in the little shells and the bloke who measured the moss on the tundra couldn’t possibly be wrong…could they?

“…The deposition rates (flux rates) of the beryllium isotope 10Be are often used as a proxy for the amount of cosmic rays.. because 10Be is produced, inter alia, by cosmic rays in the atmosphere. .. the correlation between these two 10Be datasets [Antarctica, Greenland] is pathetic…[there is] lack of any clear 11-year signal from the variations in cosmic rays. [Clear? There is none]

I seem to remember Dr Svalgaard on another thread, when we were discussing historic Sunspot numbers, said that he believed that during the Maunder Minimum Solar activity [and thus presumably the TSI] was not reduced and he based that on the Be isotope evidence, (or some other eminent scientists did). I guess that belief is on somewhat shaky ground.

“You’ve linked to the Holgate sunspot nonsense, which I falsified in my post “Sunspots and Sea Level….“.

Willis,
You did two interesting posts in which you believe you falsified two claimed correlations with solar activity: sea level rise (e.g. Holgate) and the South American river. Here are my thoughts on these two:
1. South American river flow.
The first obvious thing was that the Mk 1 eyeball didn’t show any obvious correlation. It required sophisticated statistical methods to bring out the claimed correlation. As far as I’m concerned, if it requires this kind of data manipulation then either the correlation is so small as to be of no significance, or it doesn’t exist and it’s an artifact of the analysis.
I thought your analysis was excellent and I agree that you falsified this claim. Bad news for Brian Cox, who included this claim in his excellent series ‘Wonders of the Solar System’ and also the book version.

2. Sea level (Holgate etc).
There is an obvious contrast between the two: with the Holgate data the apparent correlation almost literally reaches out and grabs you by the throat. You can see apparent correlation with the sea level data, while you cannot with the river data.
Your one argument against real correlation was a very low r2 value. I don’t think you had any other arguments.
Trouble is, r2 is essentially useless for measuring correlation between variables that do not have simple, linear relationships. r2 works by first creating the best linear fit, and then measuring how well the data points match the linear fit.
There’s a well known saying that it’s impossible to prove a negative. I think this may apply to r2. If r2 returns a high value then it’s probably significant. But if it returns a low value it’s fairly meaningless. A low value would occur if there is very high correlation but the relationship is complex and non-linear.
I imagine r2 for two identical straight lines would be 1 (one). But in a sense there’s no correlation at all. There are no features that match. They’re just – well, straight lines, basically. But if two graphs have many features and they match well, then I would say there is good correlation.
A good example comes from the ice core temperature and CO2 records. There are huge numbers of features and they match amazingly well. All believers and sceptics would agree that there is very high correlation. Of course, as it turned out, the CO2 lags the temperatures, but the correlation is extraordinary.
I would rate the sea level apparent correlation as weaker than the ice core data, but nevertheless it’s still very strong.
You are clearly claiming that the apparent relationship is due to chance. Then prove it. Generate hundreds or thousands of graphs with random data (e.g. red noise) and see how many produce a similar apparent correlation. It’s a standard statistical test (Monte Carlo), I’m really surprised you haven’t done it.
Unless you can demonstrate this then I think your falsification score on these two is one out of two.
Keep up the good work. But, please, don’t rely on a low r2 score to claim falsification. If you get a low r2 value then you need another independent argument to prove falsification.
Chris

Scarface says:
April 14, 2014 at 12:21 am1. Do I understand it correct that only 55g/yr is produced of 10Be?
Yes and that is the worldwide total.

2. If so, wouldn’t that make 10Be a very difficult proxy, because both its presence and chance of being found somewhere are so small?
55 gram is a lot of atoms and our measuring instruments [see just above] are exquisite sensitive.

3. Wouldn’t 14C make a better proxy? (slightly better; 8 kg if true isn’t much either)
For annual time resolution 14C is no goos as the residence time in the atmosphere is too long.

4. And is 10Be used because it’s in the ice-cores instead of in treerings? Or is 14C also present in CO2 that is captured in icecore bubbles?
There is also 14C in the CO2, but see your point 3.

5. Svensmarks theory is about clouds and cosmic rays. What would, in your opinion, be a good proxy for the nuclei that are said to be produced by cosmic rays?
well, the nuclei themselves are fine. No need for proxy.

Thanks again, Willis. I was just thinking this needed addressing — Dr Svalgaard’s repeated cautions on beryllium proxies was seemingly being ignored. Beryllium proxies are similar to Mann’s tree-rings — too many potential influences to be very useful.

tonyb: Here is my reconstruction of CET from 1659 to 1538. It is evident that the period around `1500 to the start of the reconstruction will turn out to be rather warm. The 50 years from 1450 look as if they were rather cold.

If you overlay your plot against this extended record how does it look?

========

I take it is something different to the ‘official’ Met. Office CET. How did you derive it? Could you post the data to a dropbox or host it somewhere for download?

I would recommend fixing the lag in the running mean before comparing to anything else. Even better use a decent low pass filter that won’t give you troughs where peaks should be ;)

Don Easterbrook: “Seems like a bit of a stretch to conclude that these longer term correlations are just coincidence”

It’s quite possible for two quantities to correlate at low frequency but much more poorly at monthly resolution. This is one of the problems with “you should NEVER smooth before doing analysis”.

If “smoothing” is just that I agree. Sadly this word is also commonly used for low-pass filtering intended to remove a specific signal (like annual). If you want to look at long term correlation, removing HF noise may be legit. It is just necessary to adjust the number of data points when subsequently doing stats since you’ve reduced the degrees of freedom in the data. (eg if you filtered monthly data with a 12mo low-pass , divide N by 12. If you are looking at R or R^2 then you need to re-evaluate what value constitute significance. )

Most recent reconstruction of thesolar activity for the past 9000 years is by Steinhilber et al
with another dozen co-writers, including McCracken, Abreu, Beer, Miyahara, etc. highly respected scientists.
Some errors in the reconstructions appear to be due to subtracting geomagnetic portion of modulation, based on the dipole data that is grossly over-filtered.

I did my own calculation, Dr. McCracken (one of the authors, ex NASA and the world expert in the field) commented :

“…….In that light, your plot is very interesting and could quantify “minor” in the above statement . What are the units of both quantities on the Y axis. Are these amplitude or power spectra. In particular, do you have the percentage amplitudes of the spectral lines in the dipole strength for T > 500 years. That would allow us to compute the periodic changes in the geomagnetic cut-off rigidity (see (1) above), and from that, compute the amplitudes of the periodic variations in 10Be and 14C due to the secular changes in the geomagnetic field. That would be a very useful finding.
Ken “

The Steinhilber et al paper’s link, the plot Dr. McCracken refers to and relevant answer to his question can be found here: GCR-etc.pdf

There was no need to explain your approach. It is evident in most articles that you don’t care about what is known; instead, you blast out with some lengthy article on things that boggle your mind, and which wouldn’t boggle at all if you had openend a book or mag for 5 minutes. This got to be the least productive approach of them all.

The only data that would make sense is not the 10Be level, but the ratio of 10Be level to 9Be, to show how much is produced. This means the total concentration must be found separately from the 10Be level. If this is done, I expect a much better correlation should be found.

But how can that be, given the convincing data that Willis and Leif have shown?
==============
the 10Be data suggests:

1. the mechanism that produces 10Be is not the same mechanism that deposits 10Be on the surface.
2. there is a lag between 10Be production and deposition.

Perhaps the mechanism is molecular weight? 10Be atoms weight less than N2, O2, H2O. Perhaps they float around in the atmosphere for years before being rained out to the surface. This would have the effect of smearing the production rate over the short term (years). Only longer term production rates would be apparent (decades, centuries).

Leonard Weinstein says:
April 14, 2014 at 6:38 amThe only data that would make sense is not the 10Be level, but the ratio of 10Be level to 9Be, to show how much is produced.
The problem is that 9Be is not radioactive so is very hard to measure and furthermore doesn’t fall out of the sky to be deposited in the ice as 10Be does, so there isn’t any.

How long is the residence time in the atmosphere on average before an atom is caught in the ice?
Is it evenly produced in the atmosphere? Could winds, rainfall and/or jetstreams prevent arrival at the poles, and thus in the ice cores?

(btw, I’m still rather speechless about the annual weight of the produced 10Be; I believe you that you can count the atoms seperately, but the distribution around the globe and the need for getting caught in the ice at the poles seem to make it a difficult proxy)

Scarface says:
April 14, 2014 at 6:51 amHow long is the residence time in the atmosphere on average before an atom is caught in the ice?
one to two years

Is it evenly produced in the atmosphere? Could winds, rainfall and/or jetstreams prevent arrival at the poles, and thus in the ice cores?
Most is produced at lower latitudes simply because there is more area down there. Atmospheric motions determine how much is transported to the poles.

Hi Willis, hope I did not miss this in the comments but if you are hitting the atmosphere with cosmic rays, such as neutrons or protons, to create Be10 you need high energy cosmic rays for that to happen. Solar cosmic rays are not energetic, and the source of the cosmic rays for spallation in the atmosphere is I believe extra solar. That means that there should in fact be no correlation between solar activity and 10Be.

For a proton to hit the nucleus and interact with it, it needs enough energy to overcome the coulomb repulsion it experiences with the nucleus, which like the proton, is positively charged. (This is what makes nuclear fusion so hard to do). Low energy protons would simply interact with the electron cloud and cause no Be10 formation.

Low energy neutrons can hit the nucleus and be absorbed, but the resultant nucleus will either be stable or beta decay back to stability. To get Be10 you need to hit a target nucleus like )16 or N14 with a whack of energy to create a highly energetic excited state that has some probability of decaying to Be10, because the decay fragments will also have to overcome the coulomb barrier for it to be possible.

That means that you have to have high energy cosmic rays, and I do not think they come from the sun.

I must confess to greater confidence on the nuclear physics as opposed to solar cosmic rays, no expertise in cosmic rays, but I am pretty sure they are due to the solar wind and are low energy, 100s of eV instead of the 10s MeV required for spallation.

I’m looking at a plot of 10Be from 1400 AD to the present and I can easily pick out the Wolf, Sporer, Maunder, Dalton, and 1880-1915 Solar Minimums from just the 10Be curve. And plotting δ18O from the GISP2 Greenland ice core data and overlaying it on the 10Be curve gives a good correlation with paleotemperature. Overlaying it on the CET temperature curve also gives a reasonably good fit—not perfect, but discernable.
***

My guess is that the climate itself is influencing the 10Be (deposition) — not the other way around.

I would highly recommend the Oulu site as it includes a software option to select the start and end date to see how GCR has changed solar cycle by solar cycle.

http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/
As I noted in my comment GCR modulation of planetary clouds is inhibited by solar wind burst that remove cloud forming ions. If there are a high number of strong solar wind bursts during the end of solar cycle the solar wind bursts remove the ions formed by the GCR making appear that high GCR does not modulate planetary clouds.

As the Oulu data shows GCR (galactic cosmic rays also called cosmic ray flux. GCR/CRF are mostly high speed protons that created by super nova explosions. The GCR strike the earth’s atmosphere creating ions that create clouds.), at the maximum of solar cycle 24 is roughly the same as the average GCR in other solar cycles. As solar cycle 24 declines cloud forming GCR will reach the highest levels in 100 years. The resultant of the high GCR will be the planet will cool.

eg if you filtered monthly data with a 12mo low-pass , divide N by 12. If you are looking at R or R^2 then you need to re-evaluate what value constitute significance.
===============
exactly!! instead whole branches of “science” process their data to “reduce noise” then naively apply statistical tests as though they were dealing with raw data. And low and behold when they find a significant R value, they can’t understand that the statistics is measuring their methods, not their data.

Statistics cannot separate data from methods. When you process the data ahead of your statistics, the statistical results reflect both the data and the methods. Maybe the significance is a result of the data, but maybe it is a result of your methods. As a result you cannot be confident in what the statistics are telling you.

The current epidemic of false positives in scientific papers is by and large a result of naively applying statistics to processed data, without considering that it is the processing that is creating a false statistical confidence.

There should be a standard rule when analyzing scientific papers. If the authors are applying statistics to filtered or processed data, the result is as likely to be garbage as not. Thus, all such papers should be rejected.

If such papers were routinely rejected, a great deal of false scientific conclusions would have been eliminated over the years.

The question why Willis Eschenbach couldn’t find any clear 11-year signal from the variations in cosmic rays via 10Be as a proxy looks to be solved with your answers, as far as I am concerned.

10Be records seem to represent long time averages of atoms, produced at different moments in time, which must somehow, someday, through a chaotic atmosphere, reach any of the poles and get caught in ice.

William Handler says:
April 14, 2014 at 7:05 amthe source of the cosmic rays for spallation in the atmosphere is I believe extra solar.
Yes, they come from the Galaxy [created in supernova explosions and accelerated en-route by encounters with the interstellar medium]. But the Sun’s magnetic field [extending into interplanetary space] is capable of deflecting some of the protons back out of the solar system, so the Sun modulates the galactic cosmic ray flux by about 10%.

Scarface says:
April 14, 2014 at 7:16 am10Be records seem to represent long time averages of atoms, produced at different moments in time, which must somehow, someday, through a chaotic atmosphere, reach any of the poles and get caught in ice.
Not too long, only a couple of years, but a lot can happen to them during that time.

Lake sediments provide useful climate records because the annual varves can provide accurate dating.
For 10Be and solar cycles see.http://gfzpublic.gfz-potsdam.de/pubman/faces/viewItemFullPage.jsp?itemId=escidoc:240535
Here is the abstract r
“Annually resolved terrestrial 10Be archives other than those in polar ice sheets are heretofore unexplored sources of information about past solar activity and climate. Until now, it has proven difficult to find natural archives that have captured and retained a 10Be production signal, and that allow for annual sampling and contain sufficient 10Be for AMS measurement. We report the first annually resolved record of 10Be in varved lake sediments. The record comes from Lake Lehmilampi, eastern Finland, which lies at 63°37′N, 29°06′E, 95.8 m a.s.l. The focus on the last 100 years provided an unprecedented opportunity to compare sediment 10Be data with annual ice core, neutron monitor and sunspot number data. Results indicate successful recovery of 10Be atoms from as little as 20 mg sediment. Sediment 10Be accumulation rates suggest control by solar activity, manifested as a reflection of the 11-year Schwabe solar cycle and its amplitude variations throughout the investigated period. These results open the possibility of using varved lake sediment 10Be records as a new proxy for solar activity, thus providing a new approach for synchronization of paleoclimate events worldwide.”
Here is another paper tying climate changes reflected in the sedimentary record to longer term solar cycles including the 1000 year cycle which I use in my forecasts at
http//climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com.

http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2012/eposters/eposter/pp33a-2077/
From the abstract.
” Based on an already established age model the study covers about two millennia of Late Miocene time with a resolution of ~13.7 years per sample. No major ecological turnovers are expected in respect to this very short interval. Thus, the pollen record suggests rather stable wetland vegetation with a forested hinterland. Shifts in the spectra can be mainly attributed to variations in transport mechanism, represented by few phases of fluvial input but mainly by changes in wind intensity and probably also wind direction. Even within this short time span, dinoflagellates document rapid changes between oligotrophic and eutrophic conditions, which are frequently coupled with lake stratification and dysoxic bottom waters. These phases prevented ostracods and molluscs from settling and fostered the activity of sulfur bacteria. Several of the studied proxies reveal iterative patterns. To compare and detect these repetitive signals REDFIT spectra were generated and Gaussian filters were applied. The resulting cycles correspond to the lower and upper Gleissberg, the de Vries/Suess, the unnamed 500-year, 1000-year 1,500-year and the Hallstatt cycles. To test the solar-forcing-hypothesis, our data have been compared with those from a Holocene isotope dataset. Our data represent a first unequivocal detection of solar cycles in pre-Pleistocene sediments.
Here is a quote from one of my posts re solar effects on climate in general
“NOTE !! the connection between solar “activity” and climate is poorly understood and highly controversial. Solar ” activity” encompasses changes in solar magnetic field strength, IMF, CRF, TSI ,EUV ,solar wind density and velocity, CMEs, proton events etc. The idea of using the neutron count as a useful proxy for changing solar activity and temperature forecasting is agnostic as to the physical mechanisms involved.”

William Astley says:
April 14, 2014 at 7:12 amI would highly recommend the Oulu site as it includes a software option to select the start and end date to see how GCR has changed solar cycle by solar cycle.
Many other sites do that too, but I would nor recommend Oulu as its counts lately has run above what other stations show.

As I noted in my comment GCR modulation of planetary clouds is inhibited by solar wind burst that remove cloud forming ions.
No, there is no evidence for that.

GCR in the north most ionizes the ozone layer over Canada and Western Siberia, which indicates a magnetic field. There radiation is bent toward the surface of the Earth. Weak solar activity means the repetition of weather types in the stratosphere and what is important for predictions.

William:
Your comment is not correct. Solar wind bursts create a space charge differential in the ionosphere which remove cloud forming ions.
The following is a review paper that describes the mechanism, a more recent paper that provides to data confirm the electroscavenging mechanism, and finally a paper that notes there were solar wind bursts in during the declining phase of solar cycle 23 which partially explains why the planet did not cool due to the increased GCR.

The mechanisms that were inhibiting GCR modulation of planetary cloud are abating. Observational evidence to support that assertion is sudden and unexplained in sea ice both poles.

http://www.utdallas.edu/physics/pdf/Atmos_060302.pdf
Atmospheric Ionization and Clouds as Links Between Solar Activity and Climate
Observations of changes in cloud properties that correlate with the 11-year cycles observed in space particle fluxes are reviewed. The correlations can be understood in terms of one or both of two microphysical processes; ion mediated nucleation (IMN) and electroscavenging. IMN relies on the presence of ions to provide the condensation sites for sulfuric acid and water vapors to produce new aerosol particles, which, under certain conditions, might grow into sizes that can be activated as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). Electroscavenging depends on the buildup of space charge at the tops and bottoms of clouds as the vertical current density (J) in the global electric circuit encounters the increased electrical resistivity of the clouds. Space charge is electrostatic charge density due to a difference between the concentrations of positive and negative ions.

The role of the global electric circuit in solar and internal forcing of clouds and climate by Brian A. Tinsley, G.B. Burns, Limin Zhou
The observed short-term meteorological responses to these five inputs are of small amplitude but high statistical significance for repeated Jz changes of order 5% for low latitudes increasing to 25–30% at high latitudes. On the timescales of multidecadal solar minima, such as the Maunder minimum, changes in tropospheric dynamics and climate related to Jz are also larger at high latitudes, and correlate with the lower energy component (_1 GeV) of the cosmic ray flux increasing by as much as a factor of two relative to present values. Also, there are comparable cosmic ray flux changes and climate responses on millennial timescales. The persistence of the longer-term Jz changes for many decades to many centuries would produce an integrated effect on climate that could dominate over short-term weather and climate variations, and explain the observed correlations.

If the Sun is so quiet, why is the Earth ringing? A comparison of two solar minimum intervals.

Observations from the recent Whole Heliosphere Interval (WHI) solar minimum campaign are compared to last cycle’s Whole Sun Month (WSM) to demonstrate that sunspot numbers, while providing a good measure of solar activity, do not provide sufficient information to gauge solar and heliospheric magnetic complexity and its effect at the Earth. The present solar minimum is exceptionally quiet, with sunspot numbers at their lowest in 75 years and solar wind magnetic field strength lower than ever observed. Despite, or perhaps because of, a global weakness in the heliospheric magnetic field, large near-equatorial coronal holes lingered even as the sunspots disappeared. Consequently, for the months surrounding the WHI campaign, strong, long, and recurring high-speed streams in the solar wind intercepted the Earth in contrast to the weaker and more sporadic streams that occurred around the time of last cycle’s WSM campaign.

“Overlaying it on the CET temperature curve also gives a reasonably good fit—not perfect, but discernable. But how can that be, given the convincing data that Willis and Leif have shown? How can both be correct? Seems like a bit of a stretch to conclude that these longer term correlations are just coincidence, or that the data isn’t very good and just happens to match up, or something unrelated to solar variation is responsible. ”

1. what is a reasonable fit?
2. CET is from a location that is quite unique geographically speaking. That is, it is not representative. Try the long records from any other location.
3. what do you mean the data isnt good? just cause it doesnt match theory? sarc off
4. “something unrelated to solar”, yes save the theory at all costs.

What you see here folks are the troubles that plague all OBSERVATIONAL SCIENCE.

what is observational science and how does it differ from lab science.

Well, in lab science we can formulate a theory and we can test a theory. We identify the variables
that we think matter, and we do controlled experiments. Like the cloud experiments at CERN.
All controlled. Theory is built, hypothesis are derived from the theory, hypothesis are tested.
Ideally everything is controlled, planned, and tested. “We predict and increase in particle X, we do the test, we see the increase”

Then comes the mistake. The mistake is thinking that all science, that all knowing, that all practical reliable knowledge and understanding comes through this method. Let’s start by granting a special status to this kind of knowledge. However, even if we do grant it a special status, it’s a mistake to make this approach to understanding and explanation, the only approach. And that is where observational
science comes in. Let’s take Leif’s solar science. Leif cannot do controlled experiments with the sun. He cannot, for example, remove jupiter to test the effect of the Jupiter on sun Spots. So what are we left with?

1. Data that cannot speak for itself. You have data that was collect haphazardly, data that was
collected for other purposes, with changing instruments, data lost, data recovered.
In short the data will always be entangled with the theory and so subject to doubt and
contention. worshippers of raw data from the lab sciences, will have a fit.
2. No way to do controlled experiments. You must wait for nature to show you what she will.
That is why this historical period is very interesting.
3. Models. because you cannot do controlled experiments you are stuck with having to model
things. These range from statistical models to physical models. Because your theory is drawn from observations that you cant control, you cant do parameter exploration unless you model. And without parameter exploration ( vary parameter x, from y to z) you really dont have a complete theory.
4. Arguments that cannot be settled by the lab method. In the end observational scientists try to construct an understanding that makes the “most sense” of all the data, that ties together with other physics, that maximizes coherence and minimizes discord. It is a making sense of the past.. more a history constrained by math, logic and physics than anything else

Atmospheric Ionization and Clouds as Links Between Solar Activity and Climate

Figure 3. Solar wind variations modulate the fluxes of GeV galactic cosmic rays and the MeV electrons coming into the atmosphere, and the ionospheric potential in the polar caps. The fluxes of energetic particles change the vertical column resistance between the ionosphere and the surface, particularly at middle and high latitudes, and this together with the variations in ionospheric potential, change the electrical currents flowing down from the ionosphere into clouds.

William Astley says:
April 14, 2014 at 8:49 amYour comment is not correct. Solar wind bursts create a space charge differential in the ionosphere which remove cloud forming ions.
There are no cloud forming ions in the ionosphere.
With all due respect to my friend Brian Tinsley, his mechanism is not generally accepted as valid.
The global circuit is maintained by thunderstorms not by the solar wind. Please don’t pollute the blog with long quotes. The link should be enough, possibly with a few lines added that make the essential point.

If the Sun is so quiet, why is the Earth ringing? A comparison of two solar minimum intervals.
You dredge up an irrelevant paper, and the WHI analysis is just over-interpretation of too little data. The Sun rings just before solar minimum and has been doing that for centuries, e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/Historical%20Solar%20Cycle%20Context.pdf

William Astley says:
April 14, 2014 at 8:58 amchange the electrical currents flowing down from the ionosphere into clouds.
The current flow is down, but that just means that the electrons [the charges] are moving up from the [thunder]clouds.

“Odd the way your crappy BEST moving average is so far outside the data in 1780. ”

Another idiot comment from greg.

The BEST Data at 1780 is the average of the entire field. the small patch of england tony refers to as well as most of europe and some of north america.

Tony is comparing CET ( a few square miles) to a much larger area.

That location (CET) along with a few others has reasonable correlation with the entire globe, although with CET ( and others) you will find years in which it is at odds with the rest of the world.

In other words, the thing you point out is expected and not anything odd.

—– ——
I don’t know which Greg Mosh was referring to but he needs to make up his mind \about CET and not contradict himself. I am happy that CET has much broader relevance and so are numerous scientists and organisation from Lamb to Jones, De Bilt to the Met Office and -depending on his mood- Mosh himself.

ferd berple “The current epidemic of false positives in scientific papers is by and large a result of naively applying statistics to processed data, without considering that it is the processing that is creating a false statistical confidence.”

Probably one cause of this is people now doing data processing using spreadsheets.
Click of “fit trend” and it gives you “the R^2” statistic. This makes massive assumptions about the data and is probably more often wrong than right.

When climategate emails showed Phil (pour Phil) Jones saying he did not know how to fit a line using a spreadsheet , he got a lot derogatory remarks here.

As far as I’m concerned he scores points for never having been stupid enough to use a spreadsheet for scientific data processing.

Paul Linsay says:
April 14, 2014 at 9:39 amThis appears to be a very convincing plot showing strong correlation of sunspots and 10 Be in a Greenland ice core
There is a crude correlation, but not a detailed one as Willis showed.

Steven Mosher says:
April 14, 2014 at 8:51 am CET is from a location that is quite unique geographically speaking. That is, it is not representative. ……..

in Defence of the CET Records CET is from a location that is quite unique geographically speaking.
Correct

That is, it is not representative.

I would respectfully disagree.
CET is to very large extent influenced by the N.Atlantic SST, from which the AMO is derived.
I have plotted HERE three sets of data:
– CET
– North Hemisphere temperature anomaly
– Global Temperature Anomaly
then calculated R2 as recommended by Dr. Svalgaard (5 year box)
and they are 0.74 and 0.71 respectively.
To conclude:
CET is the longest, the most scrutinised, least fiddled and hence most accurate temperature record the science has. Further more its specific geographic location gives it advantage of being under control of the strongest and the most important natural variability, the AMO.
I suggest your statement
“That is, it (CET) is not representative” can not be taken seriously.
Don’t ask for code and data, Excel calculates accurate R2, and data you know where to get.

Of course there probably was a lot of CO2 locally available in the Midlands in 1868, but also in the cold winters of previous industrial decades. In some industrial cities, CO2 concentration might have been higher in the late 19th century than the early 21st.

“4. Arguments that cannot be settled by the lab method. In the end observational scientists try to construct an understanding that makes the “most sense” of all the data, that ties together with other physics, that maximizes coherence and minimizes discord. It is a making sense of the past.. more a history constrained by math, logic and physics than anything else”
He is entirely right. Much of the disagreements on threads on this topic come from the fact that scientists with backgrounds in physics, maths and engineering have little experience in correlating multiple natural events in time and space. This is mainly what geologists do. I would recommend that interested reader would do well to borrow a copy of vol1 of ” The Geological Time Scale 2012.”
Gradstein et al EdsThis volume lays out in some details some of the methods used. Overall it is a bit like assembling a four dimensional jig saw with many of the bits missing. It says
“The stratigraphic record that is used includes litho-,bio,chrono,cyclo and magnetostratigraphy”
all these records vary in quality from time to time and place to place so that correlations are best made using the widest possible knowledge of the various records.
Similarly as a simple example when correlating well logs ( which have multiple tracks recording various data streams).you will find sections missing or even repeated.because of faulting, or unconformities and the apparent thickness of a section on the log will vary because of the dip of the beds- even sometimes to the point of being upside down . At the same time you may or may not have data mentioned in the previous paragraph for that same area .
The best correlation is made using expert informed judgment on all available data.
In the oil business how expert you may be is usually tested in fairly short order by the expenditure of millions of dollars. This tends to concentrate the mind onto the key observations when drawing inferences and making forecasts.
Calculating correlation coefficients on a couple of variables doesn’t enter into the proceedings as a useful tool except in very limited circumstances.

The coal burning phase of the Industrial Revolution would have increased the number of cloud condensation nuclei in Europe, just as it’s doing in China now. Maybe water vapor in the air in those regions already had all the CCNs it could use, so cloudiness wouldn’t necessarily increase.

Soot from the dark, satanic mills has been blamed for the retreat of European glaciers from c. 1860 to 1930 (link includes obligatory CACA caca):

One explanation for the high temperatures of the Cretaceous was low biological productivity in the remarkably hot tropical oceans of the Period, leading to less cloud cover. Phytoplankton contribute a lot of CCNs.

Soot or “black carbon” has also been suggested as a cause for some recent Arctic sea ice & Greenland ice sheet melting. So in ways other than CO2 human activity may well have some small effect on climate (as with cooling aerosols), but whether the net effect is to cool or warm the planet, who can say? In any case, the effect is negligible. So far increased CO2 has been beneficial.

Dr Norman Page says:
April 14, 2014 at 10:55 amThe best correlation is made using expert informed judgment on all available data.
Then why don’t you listen to what I say? and heed my ‘expert informed judgement.

Willis:
Now, my understanding is that using 10Be concentrations in ice cores doesn’t give valid results. This is because the 10Be is coming down from the sky … but so is the snow. As a result, the concentration is a factor of both the 10Be flux and the snow accumulation rate. So if we want to understand the production and subsequent deposition rate of 10Be, it is necessary to correct the 10Be concentrations by using the corresponding snow accumulation rate to give us the actual flux rate. So 10Be flux rates should show a better correlation with sunspots than concentrations, because they’re free of the confounding variable of snow accumulation rate.

As a result, I’ve used the flux rates and not the concentrations … and found nothing of interest. No correlation between the datasets, no 11-year periodicity, no relationship to the solar cycle.

=====

It appears that this “understanding” is your own personal speculation of how it happens. The snow captures the Be in the atmosphere and traps it in the snow. Now unless the snowfall is significantly depleting the atmospheric concentration you’ll just get more snow with the current atmospheric concentration. So if concentration gives more coherent results that is probably why.

Now it remains to be seen whether there is in fact a solar signal in concentration, or is that just wishful thinking?

–Richard Phillips Feynman (1918 – 1988), in his address, “What is Science?”, presented at the 15th annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), pages 313-320.

NOAA has archived concentration from Law Dome. Can’t find any archived for the Beer paper at Greenland Dye3 used by R. Rhonde in his “global warming art” on WP.

” To our knowledge, this is the first published ice core data spanning the recent exceptional solar minimum of solar cycle 23. 10Be concentrations are significantly correlated to the cosmic ray flux recorded by the McMurdo neutron monitor (rxy = 0.64, with 95 % CI of 0.53 to 0.71), suggesting that solar modulation of the atmospheric production rate may explain up to ~40 % of the variance in 10Be concentrations at DSS. Sharp concentration peaks occur in most years during the summer-to-autumn, possibly caused by stratospheric incursions. Our results underscore the presence of both production and meteorological signals in ice core 10Be data.”

If there isn’t a 11 year signal in these records, (Temp or 10Be) is there any 22 year signal ??

Since the sun’s magnetic polarity reverse each 11 year cycle, and earth’s doesn’t, their summation would have a 22 year cycle. If that affected cosmic rays or solar charged particle distributions on earth it would be a 22 year periodicity.

can’t say I understand much of this but I wonder (pure laymans question) how thaw/freeze cycles (after initial deposit, and possibly not thawed enough to release to atmosphere) may have affected the concentrations thereby “loading” the concentrations and creating one bad proxy.

Greg Goodman says:
April 14, 2014 at 11:13 amFor the same reason as I don’t listen to the “expert opinion” of the IPCC.
It is sound policy to listen to people who know. You can doubt that they know. That is a different matter and such doubt has to be founded. On what do you base your doubt of my expertise?

“These and other features suggest that galactic cosmic ray intensity changes which affect the production of 10Be in the Earths atmosphere are not the sole source of the 10Be concentration changes and confirm the importance of other effects, for example local and regional climatic effects, which could be of the same magnitude as the 10Be production changes.”

Leif Nobody knows who is the real expert until the well is drilled. On several posts on my blog athttp://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
and on various posts at WUWT,I have made forecasts for future temperature trends as far ahead as about 2600. For comparison I invite you ,Willis and any other contributors to this thread or to the topic in general to put forward your own forecasts using whatever theories or methods you feel best. Just a few sentences on the method used and some estimate of future temperatures at suitable intervals. Maybe Anthony could archive them somewhere for future reference from time to time.

Willis wrote: “What am I missing here? What am I doing wrong? How can they use the concentration of 10Be rather than the flux? Are we getting accurate results from the ice cores? If not, why not?”

a) If all of the Be10 created in the atmosphere in one year were transported to the surface in the same year (in the same relative proportion with respect to location independent of solar activity), then the surface flux would be proportional to solar activity.

b) If the rate-determining step in getting Be10 to the surface were the precipitation rate, then the concentration of Be10 in precipitation could vary with the amount of Be10 in the atmosphere.

You can’t distinguish between these two possibilities without additional knowledge. Correlation suggest that b) may play a stronger role than a).

However, there is almost certainly a “reservoir” of B10 in the upper atmosphere which is slowly transported to the troposphere over more than one year. Volcanic aerosols are not cleared in less than a year, so there is no reason to assume that Be10 will be. There is also no reason to assume that the rate at which Be10 is transported to the troposphere isn’t modified by the solar cycle (by winds and turbulent mixing). There is no reason to assume that the fraction that is deposited in polar regions is independent of the solar cycle and climate cycles. The lack of a correlation between the flux in Greenland and Antarctica is WIllis’s most damning piece of evidence about the value of Be10 as a solar proxy.

Dr Norman Page says:
April 14, 2014 at 11:53 amMaybe Anthony could archive them somewhere for future reference from time to time.
So that the folks in 2600 can see who was right.
I don’t think we can forecast the climate in detail at the present time. You extrapolations [some dubious] are not valid forecasts, with confidence intervals, error bars, etc.

For the same reason as I don’t listen to the “expert opinion” of the IPCC.

It is sound policy to listen to people who know. You can doubt that they know. That is a different matter and such doubt has to be founded. On what do you base your doubt of my expertise?

– – – – – – – –

Leif,

Two premises missing leading to listening to experts. First premise is there is the need for an expert. The second premise should be that there must first be sufficient reason for a person (like me for instance) to conclude that someone has both demonstrated consistent integrity as well as verified knowledge in an area for them to be an acceptable expert to that person.

Doubt is just one of many possible outcomes of establishing the second premise.

NOTE: I think it is more difficult to assess the integrity of a candidate that it is to assess the candidate’s knowledge.

Well without making a detailed forecast would you say re the IPCC forecasts for 2100 that they are
a) a useless exercise providing no basis for policy decisions
b)probably in the ballpark
c) possibly in the ballpark
d)probably too high
d) possibly wrong to the point that the earth might even be cooler then than now
e) I don’t know enough to make a useful comment

I agree that science cannot yet forecast climate in detail. Even WX more than a short period out is iffy.

However, based upon the past ~150 years (if not longer), it’s not IMO unreasonable to predict that the 30-year period 2007-36 will be cooler than 1977-2006. Should that occur, CACA would be in deep doo-doo, so to speak.

Should that prove not to be the case, then the argument for an important GHG contribution to global temperature would be strengthened, since cooler & warmer phases have alternated since the end of the LIA in the mid-19th century, whether a spurious coincidence or not:

John Whitman says:
April 14, 2014 at 12:58 pmDoubt is just one of many possible outcomes of establishing the second premise.
I deal with uncertainties and doubtful issues every day. It is my experience that to doubt something one must KNOW something about it. If you don’t, other reasons for doubt can be that the topic clashes with your worldview [bias] or that you doubt the PERSON [which again requires that you know something on which to base that doubt]. None of these in my book are valid scientific reasons for doubt.

Dr Norman Page says:
April 14, 2014 at 1:13 pme) I don’t know enough to make a useful comment
You mean that ‘you’ don’t know enough to make a useful statement.

milodonharlani says:
April 14, 2014 at 1:22 pmHowever, based upon the past ~150 years (if not longer), it’s not IMO unreasonable to predict that the 30-year period 2007-36
I will not call that a ‘prediction’, but an ‘extrapolation’ or ‘speculation’. Now it is OK to speculate as long as it is labeled as speculation [rather as a pretentious ‘prediction’].

I’m not sure how you’re doing your correlation Willis but did you use smoothed data? Could the nature of the data processing be affecting the apparent correlation. Obviously this is an even more serious issue for spectral analysis (obvious aliasing issue with smoothed data) but I’m guessing you’ve dealt with this.

All that being said, visual comparison should suffice and would support all that’s being said. My main concern over the use of proxies is that no one ever mentions natural smoothing (proxy mobility through strata) and whether it is an issue.

Anthony has a laugh at Stephen Wilde, pokes fun at Doug Cotton, and then proceeds to have two clowns have total run of his web-site. Leif and Willis, the blind leading the blind.

THE CLOWN SHOW.

Anthony in addition protects them from posters like myself who challenge these fools on each and every assumption they make . The have nothing to back up what they say ,yet Anthony allows their idiotic views to be constantly expressed.

Anytime anyplace I would debate these two clowns on the climate and what makes it run.

[Reply: debate with whomever you like. But the policy of this site is to allow everyone to have their say, short of violating the Policy page, or eventualy in a few cases, wearing out their welcome. ~ mod.]

milodonharlani says:
April 14, 2014 at 1:22 pm
“….the 30-year period 2007-36 will be cooler than 1977-2006.”
………….
Not a forecast, I have no knowledge for that, however if I extrapolate three fundamental components of the CET (one summer, one winter and one common to both) assuming natural variability is the driver, I get THIS , and consequently the N. Hemisphere and perhaps the global, since they all correlate well.

Possibly prediction means something else in physics than in biology or paleontology, in which disciplines it is not considered pretentious, for instance, to “predict” that tetrapod fossils will be found in Devonian rocks in the Canadian Arctic. So my speculation that the current 30 year period will be cooler than the last is a testable, ie falsifiable, hence scientific prediction, even if not meeting your exacting standard for the term.

Apropos of making predictions without error bars, I’m reminded of experimental physicist Ernest Rutherford, who said, “If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” So maybe the term does mean the same in physics as in other sciences.

But if you’d like, I could express my speculation statistically, although not sure if that would make it any less pretentious. Maybe more so.

milodonharlani says:
April 14, 2014 at 3:49 pmSo my speculation that the current 30 year period will be cooler than the last is a testable, ie falsifiable, hence scientific prediction, even if not meeting your exacting standard for the term.
Unless you give a range of how much cooler it is not a valid prediction. If we find that it is cooler by 0.00001 degrees that does not count as validation of your ideas.

My prediction is for a return to the same average global temperature for the current 30 year period (2007-36) as for 1947-76 or cooler. No upper error bar between the GAST for that cool period & for the warm 1977-2006.

milodonharlani says:
April 14, 2014 at 4:44 pmMy prediction is for a return to the same average global temperature for the current 30 year period (2007-36) as for 1947-76 or cooler.
This assumes that we know with precision what the global temperature was for 1947-1976, which I don’t think we do.

You’re right, we don’t, since the surface station record has been so stepped upon, corrupted, folded, bent, spindled & mutilated. But I have enough confidence to go with reconstruction as of the first IPCC report.

milodonharlani says:
April 14, 2014 at 4:54 pmAlternatively, 0.3 to 0.5 degrees C cooler than the satellite era average, 1979 to 2008.
Fair enough, but why was getting this like squeezing blood from a stone :-)

Because precision didn’t seem required for purposes of falsifying CACA, which claims that the current 30 year period should be warmer than now. Indeed continued flatness for years rather than would falsify IPeCaC, since the previously designated 17 years of no statistical warming has come & gone. But IMO the plateau will be followed not by mountains but a valley.

milodonharlani says:
April 14, 2014 at 5:02 pmBecause precision didn’t seem required for purposes of falsifying CACA,
When the motivation for a forecast [based on opinion] is to falsify some other one, there is an unavoidable element of bias. This is human nature.

10Be is not an orphan. Let’s not forget that δ14C tells a similar story. The production rate of 14C in the atmosphere is a function of the neutron flux, so deviation of 14C ages from calendar years (δ14C) reflects changes in the neutron flux. δ14C has been calculated from comparing measurements of 14C in tree rings to the calendar age of the tree rings and is well established for the past 15,000 years or so. 14C in CO2 makes its way into all living organisms and into calcium carbonate (calcite, CaCO3) of marine shells and precipitated CaCO3. One of the nice things about stalactites in caves is that you can also measure δ18O and that gives you a paleotemperature record to go with the δ14C proxy of the neutron flux. There have been measurements of δ14C and δ18O from cave stalactites which show remarkable correlations of δ14C (i.e., neutron flux variations) and δ18O (paleotemperature) over several thousand years.
So both 10Be and δ14C tell the same tale even though their occurrences take very different paths.

10Be is not an orphan. Let’s not forget that δ14C tells a similar story. The production rate of 14C in the atmosphere is a function of the neutron flux, so deviation of 14C ages from calendar years (δ14C) reflects changes in the neutron flux. δ14C has been calculated from comparing measurements of 14C in tree rings to the calendar age of the tree rings and is well established for the past 15,000 years or so.

====

That’s a very good point. That deviation in dC14 is an important factor in the calibration of radio-carbon dating and has been studied in great detail with no agenda other than getting accurate dating.

Now I know that there are at least two schools of thought on the best calibration curves but they are not too far apart ( deviations concentrate on certain short periods ).

Perhaps it would be a good idea to compare dC14 correction curves to Be flux and concentration.

BTW does anyone have any links for Be concentration ? All I found was the short period 1999-2009 that I linked above.

The figure above compares the degree of cloudiness (global) compiling data from four satellites Nimbus-7, Endurance, ISCCP-C2, ISCCP-D2 (points on the graph) and the neutron flux Climax station (red line). In addition, also shown (blue line and dashed) number of radio radiation (at a wavelength of 10.7 cm) reaching us from the sun.

LeifIf you don’t, other reasons for doubt can be that the topic clashes with your worldview [bias] or that you doubt the PERSON [which again requires that you know something on which to base that doubt]. None of these in my book are valid scientific reasons for doubt.
.
You underestimate the reasons for doubt based on the PERSON and it is actually quite a scientifically valid reason for doubt.
For instance if you establish by observation that a high proportion of some population is lying and/or ideologically biased, then it is a reasonable assumption that ANY given member of the same population is also lying and/or ideologically biased.
For instance while I have a limited trust to IPCC WG1 members, I would spontaneously doubt any statement of any member of IPCC WG2.
The evidence brought by Climategate and by reading statements by people like Hansen, Mann, Rahmstorff, Jones, Gleick etc etc abundantly demonstrates lies and/or ideological bias so that doubt is not only warranted but a statistically reasonable thing to do.
Then it is quite irrelevant whether such people have or have not some knowledge about some technical domains in science because the doubt is not based on the quality and quantity of their knowledge but on their personality (defects).

TomVonk says:
April 15, 2014 at 2:36 amYou underestimate the reasons for doubt based on the PERSON and it is actually quite a scientifically valid reason for doubt.
For instance if you establish by observation that a high proportion of some population is lying and/or ideologically biased, then it is a reasonable assumption that ANY given member of the same population is also lying and/or ideologically biased.

It then comes down to establishing whether or not a GIVEN person belongs to that population and THAT you cannot do without direct evidence about that person, and that is the flaw in your argument.

Greg says:
“Perhaps it would be a good idea to compare dC14 correction curves to Be flux and concentration”

I”m in the process of doing that–takes awhile to sift thru the data. Should be interesting. Since both 14C and 10Be appear to be dancing in tune with paleotemp, one would expect some measure of correlation between the two. We’ll see.

vuk says:
April 15, 2014 at 8:42 amHERE I superimpose the Earth’s magnetic field GMF spectra
As long as you don’t specify what you call the Earth’s magnetic field the plot is useless. Is GMF the dipole component, the average total field over the surface or over a region, or what?

Love your point about looking with fresh eyes… Somewhere or other I read a reference that most of the breakthroughs made in various fields came from newcomers to the field. Folks without the pre-existing dogma filters. Ever since then I’ve done a modified form of what you do. I look around a “little bit” to get the big chunks of what’s likely correct, then plunge in on my own; only then go back to a literature search.

In general, I’ve found far more interesting stuff in the “first plunge” than any time after. Usually a couple of dogmatic things end up naked and pathetic looking. It’s a great technique, IMHO.

Per Be: It sure looks like it is more of a precipitation proxy than a cosmic ray proxy.

So, can we show a 10-11 year precipitation cycle with solar coorelation? If so, then Be is still a valid solar indicator, just not a very good cosmic ray indicator… and for reasons other than radiation…. They might have the coorelation right, but the causality wrong ;-)

lsvalgaard says:
April 15, 2014 at 9:19 am
“As long as you don’t specify what you call the Earth’s magnetic field the plot is useless. Is GMF the dipole component, the average total field over the surface or over a region, or what?”

Hi Doc
Nice to see that you are still around.
We discussed it on a many occasion. Data is calculated by LeMouel, Jackson & Bloxham; it is used by JPL-NASA, but if you do suspect quality of their data, please do tell them off.
I only put their data through my spectrum analyser.

vuk says:
April 15, 2014 at 9:59 amWe discussed it on a many occasion. Data is calculated by LeMouel, Jackson & Bloxham; it is used by JPL-NASA, but if you do suspect quality of their data, please do tell them off.
It is not them who are at fault here, but you. You did not specify what the data represent or give a link to them. Just to say that the data is calculated by something does not give people a clue to what the data are and how to get them.

lsvalgaard says:
It then comes down to establishing whether or not a GIVEN person belongs to that population and THAT you cannot do without direct evidence about that person, and that is the flaw in your argument.

Unfortunately, the Global Warming Fuddites have done such a wonderful job of corrupting pretty much every organ of science with spurious papers “proving” that CO2 causes everything from hangnails to obesity to extinctions and volcanoes that it means ANY scientist is now tarnished with their brush.

I don’t say that lightly. Most of my sentient life I’ve loved science as a pure tool of truth. Any scientist was given the “benefit of the doubt” with a “probably correct until shown wrong”. Painted with a “trustworthy assessment” above all others.

Post AGW Alarmism, I find that my attitudes have been shifted (against my will and desires…) to ones that assert “ANY scientist is likely to be lying, self delusional, or a grant whore – possibly more than any other motivation – and with only a weak motivation for ‘the truth’; until shown otherwise.” Painted with a “trustworthy assessment” below that of politicians (to whom they are handmaidens, or worse, now…) and used car salesmen (who at least deliver a real product). I don’t like it; but there it is. There are now thousands (millions?) of obviously politically driven junk papers published as evidence.

So now I am skeptical first, doubtful second, suspicious third, challenging fourth, investigative fifth etc. etc. of ANYONE and ANY PAPER from “scientists”. That burns my soul more than anything else in the whole AGW farce. That they sacrificed honor in science on the altar of PC.

So you get splattered with “collateral damage” from that. Sorry, but “reputation” no longer matters… and “science” of today has a bad one anyway… (And that from someone who wanted to be in science from about age 5, and my first chemistry set, on to today; and cherished my first white lab coat…)

E.M.Smith says:
April 15, 2014 at 10:18 amit means ANY scientist is now tarnished with their brush.
And so you would claim that because a nut shoots people in Kansas that ALL Americans are racist. I get your drift.

Yes. IMO CACA or CACCA is now preferable to CAGW. But they both stand for BS.

At best, a scientific case can be made for MAGW, where M stands for Mild, or BAGW, with B for Beneficial.

But the GCMs remain worse than worthless WAGs. They overstate the positive feedback from water vapor by a factor of 3, 4 or more (in earlier IPeCaC reports), while ignoring the powerful negative feedback of clouds condensed from higher atmospheric molecular H2O content, if indeed that is ever shown to happen at all from increased CO2.

GCMs commit the logical fallacy of begging the question, ie assuming what they intend to demonstrate. They’re designed to show global T increasing with CO2 concentration alarmingly, so that’s what they do. However they bear no (or negative) relationship to the real climate system, as shown by comparison with actual observations. Models just look sciency, allowing CACA prophets of doom to profit from the scam more readily. It’s a hoax & were it not for a possible chilling effect on real science, its charlatan tricksters should be hauled up on fraud, conspiracy, theft, extortion & manslaughter charges.

Continued CO2 increases might make the world as much as 0.3 degrees C warmer over the next 30 years than it would have been without further increase from 400 ppm, but I doubt even that mild, beneficial effect. As indicated by my prediction for the next climate fluctuation, IMO more CO2 won’t offset natural variability enough to prevent global cooling between now & c. 2036.

(Tried to post this previously, but it didn’t take. Have removed a possibly offending sentence. Apologies for duplication if the original appears too.)

Yes. IMO CACA or CACCA is now preferable to CAGW. But they both stand for BS.

At best, a scientific case can be made for MAGW, where M stands for Mild, or BAGW, with B for Beneficial.

But the GCMs remain worse than worthless WAGs. They overstate the positive feedback from water vapor by a factor of 3, 4 or more (in earlier IPeCaC reports), while ignoring the powerful negative feedback of clouds condensed from higher atmospheric molecular H2O content, if indeed that is ever shown to happen at all from increased CO2.

GCMs commit the logical fallacy of begging the question, ie assuming what they intend to demonstrate. They’re designed to show global T increasing with CO2 concentration alarmingly, so that’s what they do. However they bear no (or negative) relationship to the real climate system, as shown by comparison with actual observations. Models just look sciencey, allowing CACA prophets of doom to profit from the scam more readily.

Continued CO2 increases might make the world as much as 0.3 degrees C warmer over the next 30 years than it would have been without further increase from 400 ppm, but I doubt even that mild, beneficial effect. As indicated by my prediction for the next climate fluctuation, IMO more CO2 won’t offset natural variability enough to prevent global cooling between now & c. 2036.

“Once a significant percentage of folks from Kansas have started shooting at folks, I’ll wear a bullet proof vest when visiting Kansas” is a more accurate paraphrase. All people in Kansas then being looked at cautiously, though not convicted nor even accused.

Note that “significant percentage” is not the same as your “a nut”. You also transition from “shoots people” to “racist” in a strange lack of connection. “A nut” often shoots people for non-racist reasons. So no, your non-sequitur is non-useful.

It is really a very simple thing. Rather like the problem with Priests and little boys. There was a time when Priests were seen as impeccable by many folks (myself included). Those days are now gone thanks to a “significant percentage” of Priests caught doing bad things. That does not mean “ALL” Priests are bad and can not control themselves around little boys; but it does mean I’d not hand my kid over to ANY Priest without a lot of checking…

Your resort to an “reductio ad absurdum” argument may make you feel better, but only hides the truth, rather than advancing it.

The simple truth is that the reputation of ALL scientists is tarnished and made suspect (until proven otherwise by investigation, possibly repeatedly) by the follies of the “science establishment” that has vetted and published so much junk under their auspices of authority while wrapped in the mantle of Science. They roll with the pigs, and got muddy. Now the mud flies to anyone near them. That’s all scientists. Folks like you now need to find ways to wash it off or distance yourselves. That’s not happened yet.

E.M.Smith says:
April 15, 2014 at 10:43 amThe simple truth is that the reputation of ALL scientists is tarnished and made suspect
Painting everybody with the same brush is not a reasonable thing to do. But, hey, there should be room in this world for all kind of people, so have it your way.

Just a quick comment here regarding the Younger Dryas, as I see it was mentioned briefly earlier. There are many scientists such As Dr. William Napier and a number of other scientists, mostly Astronomers, that link the large increases in both carbon 14 and 10 Beryllium to encounters with comets and or asteroids. I concur with that view. Rod Chilton, climatologist.

Yes. IMO CACA or CACCA is now preferable to CAGW. But by any acronym, the scam is BS.

At best, a scientific case can be made for MAGW, where M stands for Mild, or BAGW, with B for Beneficial.

But the GCMs remain worse than worthless WAGs. They overstate the positive feedback from water vapor by a factor of 3, 4 or more (in earlier IPeCaC reports), while ignoring the powerful negative feedbacks of evaporative cooling & clouds condensed from higher atmospheric molecular H2O content, if indeed that is ever shown to happen at all from increased CO2.

GCMs commit the logical fallacy of begging the question, ie assuming what they intend to demonstrate. They’re designed to show global T increasing with CO2 concentration alarmingly, so that’s what they do. However they bear no (or negative) relationship to the real climate system, as shown by comparison with actual observations. Models just look sciencey, allowing CACA prophets of doom to profit from the scam more readily. It’s a hoax & were it not for a possible chilling effect on real science, its charlatan tricksters should be hauled up on fraud, conspiracy, theft, extortion & manslaughter charges.

Continued CO2 increases might make the world as much as 0.3 degrees C warmer over the next 30 years than it would have been without further increase from 400 ppm, but I doubt even that mild, beneficial effect. As indicated by my prediction for the next climate fluctuation, IMO more CO2 won’t offset natural variability enough to prevent global cooling between now & c. 2036.

Yes. IMO CACA or CACCA is now preferable to CAGW. But regardless of acronym, the hypothesis is BS.

At best, a scientific case can be made for MAGW, where M stands for Mild, or BAGW, with B for Beneficial.

But the GCMs remain worse than worthless WAGs. They overstate the positive feedback from water vapor by a factor of 3, 4 or more (in earlier IPeCaC reports), while ignoring the powerful negative feedbacks of evaporative cooling & of clouds condensed from higher atmospheric molecular H2O content, if indeed that is ever shown to happen at all from increased CO2.

GCMs commit the logical fallacy of begging the question, ie assuming what they intend to demonstrate. They’re designed to show global T increasing with CO2 concentration alarmingly, so that’s what they do. However they bear no (or negative) relationship to the real climate system, as shown by comparison with actual observations. Models just look sciencey, allowing CACA prophets of doom to profit from the scam more readily. It’s a hoax & were it not for a possible chilling effect on real science, its charlatan tricksters should be hauled up on fraud, conspiracy, theft, extortion & manslaughter charges.

Continued CO2 increases might make the world as much as 0.3 degrees C warmer over the next 30 years than it would have been without further increase from 400 ppm, but I doubt even that mild, beneficial effect. As indicated by my prediction for the next climate fluctuation, IMO more CO2 won’t offset natural variability enough to prevent global cooling between now & c. 2036.

First question (anyone) is it not possible to measure 10Be flux or concentrations directly at the present time to establish that there is an actual relation with cosmic ray flux? Perhaps this might be possible using an air sampler on an airplane. Second, there are lots of reasons why 10Be is unlikely to be properly sampled from the atmosphere in the snowfall building up the ice:

a) I think there is too much weather going on to expect an accurate accumulation measure by year in ice core. If the stuff even fell down as a reasonable sample, frequent blizzards and drifting would disrupt the record before there was any consolidation.
b) Isn’t there supposed to be a grand mix up in the firn for last 60 years or more of accumulation? Presumably this is the reason we can’t get CO2 or 18O2 measures in the ice for the period of the instrumental temperature record.
c) What is the settling rate of a very light atom, lighter than the atmospheric molecules and what about Brownian motion – minute particles in a gas (or liquid) move chaotically because of collisions with the gas molecules. It seems to me they would never settle. The sample is likely from the small percentage of atoms that would collide with the surface of the earth. These, logically, would be part of multiyears of formation, maybe even suspended in the atmosphere over several solar cycles.

vukcevic says:
April 15, 2014 at 3:40 pmYou have data, so you can check it out.
You are evasive (again), but even if I had, that would not help other folks trying to understand what you are showing.

Gary Pearse says:
April 15, 2014 at 4:03 pm
First question (anyone) is it not possible to measure 10Be flux or concentrations directly at the present time to establish that there is an actual relation with cosmic ray flux? Perhaps this might be possible using an air sampler on an airplane.

The total amount of 10Be produced over the globe per year is 2 ounces (55 gram) so there is not much to sample.

Tony
No contradiction
Just perspective
1 people need to realize that there are other long records beside cet
2. Its not geographically representative. Northern latitude island with a very small seasonal range
3. Its well correlated but thats true of many records
4. A solid analysis would look at all data.
5. Its not some sort of magical gold standard.

I dont mind measured reasoned claims about it. Claims made that are fully caveated and compared with others.

Tony
No contradiction
Just perspective
1 people need to realize that there are other long records beside cet
2. Its not geographically representative. Northern latitude island with a very small seasonal range
3. Its well correlated but thats true of many records
4. A solid analysis would look at all data.
5. Its not some sort of magical gold standard.

I dont mind measured reasoned claims about it. Claims made that are fully caveated and compared with others.

——– ——– ——
Yes, you are contradicting yourself, read what you originally said.

I do try to introduce caveats but in a short blog post that is impossible. However, in my articles the caveats are there, together with confirmation as to who believes CET is a good but not perfect proxy. As you must know by now, as regards historic records, my favourite saying is that of Lamb’s ‘We can understand the tendency but not the precision.’

So we can see the general direction of travel but shouldn’t claim accuracy to fractions of a degree.
tonyb

Here is another quick look at the Greenland 10Be (flux and concentration) data modulated by the SSNhttp://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GRLND-10Be.htm
whereby 10Be lags SSN by 6 to 8 years.
data: 10Be from the article’s. link, SSN from SIDC

The Excel spreadsheet I linked to contains the original data, along with their original notes. That’s what I used. Remember that the spreadsheet contains both flux and concentration data, and the flux data is what I used.

Well done guys, publish your findings. I suppose there is no point in raising the fact, Greenland was abandoned at one stage in ancient history. When the climate didn’t favor agriculture or fishing. Although some stayed on they were too inbred and faded out.

The “Otzi Ice man” was discovered in 1991 after being entombed under a glacier for thousands of years, he has been dated back to the so-called “stone age”, but he had a bronze axe, but it was later discovered that he was killed by a stone tip arrow.

How did a glacier form over him thousands of years ago?
How did he have a bronze axe during the stone age?

My point is, not everyone has abandoned ancient history and what we can learn from it.
Humans have been on this planet in its present form for over 500,000 years, apparently humans began to flourish again after the last major ice age. What causes an interglacial and then an ice age?

Willis, he is around 5,000 years old, but initial research and investigation plus the rescue was critical to further extensive analysis and the weather in the region too. And more recently portable X Ray and CT equipment has been used that uncovered the arrow head that was a different style to the ones he had with him. He was mummified, or freeze dried, so initially he would have been exposed to the elements. Then the political arguments of who owned him, and what tests he should be subjected too. Some say he was traveling with companions and were attacked by others, as three different human blood types were found on the remains of his clothes that were found eventually. The ax was found near his body too, as was a stone knife, a pouch with some fungi and unknown objects in it thought to be cultural and it may have been a symbol of status, as it was made from pure bronze. They don’t know if it was his, but they think it was as it would have been a prized possession, and on the cusp of the bronze age emerging. He fell from a cliff at sometime, but may have lived for a time before dieing. He was sheltered by a rock, so he didn’t slide with the glacier that formed over him that generally eventually tear a body apart. That year other more modern cadavers were found, because the glacier in that area had an unusual melt, thought to be brought on by dust or ash from a volcanic eruption that didn’t reflect the warmth from the atmosphere. They found he suffered from worms,and what he ate in his last meal, and his approximate age. (50) Also evidence of other wounds, that would have not been fatal. They don’t know if he was coming or going from the settlement below where he was found either. One interesting physiological trait, he still displayed prominent brow arches but no DNA could point exactly where his gene pool originated from, so far. They think Corsica. He is on display now in an Italian town that has benefited from tourism.
They first thought he died a natural death from hypothermia, but this was eventually dismissed, when the arrow head was discovered.

Modern Europeans not Africans or Cro-Magnum are more recent that 500 k. Neanderthals were only found in Europe and parts of Asia (limited) and similar metabolic and physical attributes to the modern Eskimo or Inuit, prior to being introduced to a carbohydrate rich diet. Lived on mainly protein and fat.

Actually the spelling Ortzi is Austrian and Otzi is another spelling. Both correct.

What causes an interglacial or full glacial? Well one explanation is the sun and orbit, but also there is the lack of warmth in the Gulf Stream. Usually preceded by a warm period that melts sea ice and brings fresh water into the gulf stream, then it freezes over when the land temperatures drop and permafrost dominates Ice and snow don’t thaw and build up. No human inhabited a region if it was unable to support land animals that they hunted. They didn’t need refrigeration either.

Neanderthals have no relation to modern humans, Modern humans have been around for over five hundred thousand years, They never met. Early Modern humans had the same brain and physique as us. That’s over five hundred thousand years ago.

I agree no Neanderthals are present in our DNA, but there has been finds that suggest some may have bred with modern humans. Modern humans i.e., Homo sapien sapien are not five hundred thousand years old, not in Europe, America or Asian countries. However, prominent eye bridges, although known to be a feature of Neanderthal humans, have decreased . But no Neanderthal type Homo sapien has been found in Africa. The reason being it was warmer, and Neanderthal had adapted to a cold climate and diet of mainly protein, fat etc. They survived longer as a distinctive genus longer than our present Homo sapien sapien. I suspect Neanderthal ladies were attracted to the more handsome Cro Magnum man, LOL.

As a postscript, there are lots of gaps in the archaeological record. Cro-Magnum man and woman, appeared in Europe around 40,000 years ago. We haven’t a clue how many there were and also how many Neanderthals there were left at any one time. There is no reason why they couldn’t interbreed.